Armando Hidalgo – Platinum Auto Finance

Director of Servicing at Platinum Auto Finance

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On this episode of Digital Transformers, we'll speak with Armando Hidalgo, Director of Servicing at Platinum Auto Finance about how hurricanes influenced his digital transformation.

About The Guest

Armando Hidalgo is the Director of Servicing at Platinum Auto Finance with over 25 years of experience in consumer auto finance collections and servicing.

About The Hosts

Graeme Gilovitz is the Global Business & Sales Development Leader at Lightico who loves nothing more than a digitally complete journey. Eytan Morgenstern is the Director of Media Communications at Lightico who tells the stories of those digital journeys.

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Transcript

(lightly edited)

Graeme Gilovitz	Hey everyone and welcome to this episode of the digital transformers podcast here at the podcast. We’re obsessed with how companies navigate the rapidly changing environment that we find ourselves in every day. And we especially love talking to leaders from a wide range of industries about how they are meeting the challenge of digitizing their business and customer interactions. Hi everyone. I’m Graeme Gilovitz
Eytan Morgenstern	and I’m Eytan Morgenstern and we’re your hosts on the Digital Transformers Podcast. Today, we’re talking with Armando Hidalgo, director of servicing at florida-based Platinum Auto Finance. We’re going to talk to him about how hurricanes impacted his digital transformation.
Graeme Gilovitz	Eytan – It’s actually very timely that we’re speaking to Armando because and for someone who is from Australia, this is a rather interesting subject. The hurricane season in Florida and the United States actually commenced on one June and lasts until November 30. Now, why am I telling you this? Because the majority of them are actually going to land and take place between August and September and when I was reading in the Miami Herald, an article from about, I think it was in June. They already were making predictions that there will be between 13 and 20 named storms this season. 6 to 10 hurricanes and 3 to 5 major hurricanes. Now, for me, this is completely mind-boggling. And when I did some additional research yesterday on the cost of this damage, there was an article that stated that there was 10 years, 10 consecutive years where there were no less than $8 billion damage cycle hurricanes rather
Eytan Morgenstern	Eight cyclones that cost over a billion dollars in damage.
Graeme Gilovitz	100%. That is just mind boggling from not just how it impacts people’s lives. You know, first and foremost it’s all about sanctity of life, but then it’s really interesting to talk about and understand how there is business and customer continuity when they have literally access to nothing.
Eytan Morgenstern	Yeah, A lot of times when we’re talking about the costs associated with the, with the hurricane or tropical storm, whatever it is, you know, it’s a direct cost, houses, destroyed, cars, destroyed, businesses, um, destroyed. But there’s also that issue of, you know, business stops, right. Things come to a standstill for days or weeks at a time.
Graeme Gilovitz	I think that’s the hidden cost of what we see on television. When you watch the news, you see people’s homes being destroyed off, you see floods, you see people homeless, but then there’s all these other impacts that take place and that’s what we’re gonna be talking to Amanda today about how they ready their business and how that actually impacted and actually potentially, you know, saved them throughout the pandemic.
Eytan Morgenstern	Yeah, I think it would be a great, really interesting story. We’re going to have a Mondo join us here in a moment. Armando, thank you for joining us today. Um before you know, before we get into the questions, maybe you should give us a little background for the viewers or listeners rather to understand sort of, you know, about yourself Platinum Auto and give a little background on that.
Armando Hidalgo	Okay, not a problem. Good morning. My name is Armando Hidalgo with Platinum Auto Finance. We are located in Clearwater florida. Um I’m originally from texas, I’ve been here for three years. Um, the model finances, uh, pretty much we’re trying to expand our footprint here in the, in the florida market, um doing doing really well. Um then all in subprime. Um, so yeah,
Eytan Morgenstern	okay, excellent. Graeme, You want to get started?
Graeme Gilovitz	Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much Armando for joining us today. Listen, I’ve seen lots of podcasts and you’ve been highly visible talking about what you’ve done during the pandemic. But what was really interesting for us is that it seemed that your preparedness for dealing with The pandemic in the last 12 months and also returning to work Really stemmed back to your hurricane preparedness note program that you developed in 2019. Um For people like me, I’m originally Australian hurricane season just looks like crazy when we watch movies and stuff like that, cannot even not even imagine what it feels like. My question really want to just kick off today is What was that program that you developed and why did you only started in 2019? What was the critical event that made you actually kick that off?
Armando Hidalgo	Well And it’s the reason the reason that we did it is because we had we had two offices which, you know, if one we the contingency was, if one of them was subject to hurricane, we had our other office which was in north Carolina. We had that. And so we kind of had that contingent contingency plan was there? If something catastrophic event happened in florida, we could always switch over to north Carolina, vice versa. If north Carolina got hit, we all, we could all always uh, you know, switch over to Clearwater. Well, when the centralist, we actually centralist and uh mid 2018 is when we actually centralized operations here to Clearwater florida. At that point in time we made it, we made it a priority to get a contingency plan going uh just in case because of the demographic and you’re right, hurricanes. I’m originally from Texas, you know, in texas, you have tornadoes which are basically you seek shelter right away. You don’t know when it’s gonna hit. You seek shelter. Uh, here in Florida, the differences, hurricanes, you know, tornado versus hurricanes, you have an alert, but you don’t know when it’s gonna make landfall and you don’t know what category it’s going to be. So you’re looking at saying, well, you know, evacuation or supplies, that’s the key, that’s the key to making it out of these things. So, um here in Florida, this is why we prioritize and saying we need to come up with a contingency plan for uh, should something happen here, we started developing that June uh probably about august uh Of 2018. We started getting, we got together with leadership, uh, you know, in the synergy kind of based environment here to where everybody brought their ideas and we built a model.
Graeme Gilovitz	Can I ask you, Armando. Besides the centralization of your offices, was there something compelling? Because I’m sure when you’re sitting there you’re centralizing all your operations, you’re looking at okay workflow, how many staff done in each office, looking at maybe centralizing your service and your tech was there. Did it come to the preparedness for hurricanes come from a process that you are already undertaking around technology and people? Or did something happen that said, hold on, we need to put hurricanes on our radar of something that we actually need to prepare for. So which one was was it the hurricanes that made you think more about how to prepare for it or was it just your tech stack? And you thought, oh, this could also help us out in the occasion of having a hurricane.
Armando Hidalgo	It was actually both. It’s good that you asked that question because it was both because when you have a situation where you have, you know, your, when your, your tech stack is dependent on locally local servers and you’re not able to, you know, uh, like now a web based staff. So that was something that, uh, with the development and growth in the centralization, everything that’s just why we did it is because we wanted to be a little bit more mobile agile and also being able to respond uh, to a natural disaster. Especially now that we were now in a demographic, uh, where we’re really close too close to the west side of the gulf.
Graeme Gilovitz	Yeah. So that increase your exposure to, to, to uh, to events that could make it worse for you. So leading on from that, I got a question which is, um, so was it more this program driven by the business? Or is it more from a technology background? So it running this program saying, hey, let’s do consolidation? Or was it more driven by the business? Because a lot of people today, you know, sometimes we have these programs and they’re not always, you know, working hand in glove. So in your case, who was really running that program? And what did that program look like?
Armando Hidalgo	It was, it was, I, I think it was a little bit of a little bit of both because we were, we were trying, again, we’re trying to streamline our operations, you know, trying to get more with less. So this is something that we did want to take a look at our tech or tech stack at the time, was, uh, was ancient, it was prehistoric, you know, uh, compared to the times, uh, now in the tech that was available, that tech that was available then. Um but it was something that we it was a business decision. It worked hand in hand, it kind of incorporated itself uh together with the contingency plan for this uh, for a disaster plan. So it was, it was almost again, it was knocking out two birds with one stone. It’s one we improve our text act and to uh we have a contingency plan, so it really wrapped itself up into one. Um and the applications that we were using again, we’re, you know, it’s uh localized server platforms, uh to where we went to web base, you know, uh even looked at going to AWS as a server and and being able to, you know, switch from one to the other without a break in service.
Eytan Morgenstern	That’s a good interesting point because a lot of times you have, you know, this drive for technology um, that you want to provide immediate ROI, whereas a contingency plan might not have any value for a long time. And here you’re describing basically where they work together, right? Technology helped you immediately by making things more efficient and faster. But also prepared you for the, you know, a disaster of some sort
Armando Hidalgo	in, in that, in that sense. And also with that thought in mind saying, you know, so we wanted to look at, you know, how did, how did we improve, how do we improve? Uh, communications with our outside sales staff, you know, because we did have outside sales staff, sales staff in north Carolina and still it, uh, and the southern part of florida, you know, outside in, in, in our demographic, in our footprint of dealers we had. And we were saying, okay, how do we make it more productive saying, you know, through tech? Well june was an answer um, team viewer
Graeme Gilovitz	that Armando can you give us in our listeners an idea of what your tax stack looked at looked like beforehand. The criteria that you looked at in order to move it forward and what it looks like now.
Armando Hidalgo	Sure, sure. We had a what they call a desk phone for our telephony for our communications. We had a desk
Graeme Gilovitz	phone. Sorry, can you repeat that? Did you say a desk phone?
Armando Hidalgo	Yes. You know the one that that sits there and you have to actually, you know, dial the number, not the wrong digit and you have to start all over again.
Eytan Morgenstern	it was a rotary.
Armando Hidalgo	It was, it was in the room and it had a digital display, you know, so that
Graeme Gilovitz	I would love to see your kids faces when they walk in the office and say dad is what’s this toy on your desk? This is a paperweight. I
Armando Hidalgo	know it was it was you know and like I said, I arrived here at three years ago and coming from from texas uh huh. You know technology is a little bit more available there and you know and of course the platinum at that time was still growing and developing. So when I did, when I got here that’s that’s what we had we had a desk phone um you know, dialing the digits uh which was also for for uh as far as making phone call, it was hard but what was even harder was the analytics behind it? You didn’t the reporting sweets that it had were very very limited, you couldn’t do anything with it and it was really hard to set up um And again it served its purpose at the time because of the size of platinum at that time. But platinum had already grown to exceed the limits of you know, that platform. We also had a lap app, what they used to call lap app, which was something that they were using a very very uh basic, basic uh crm, you know, your computer records management and that and also the L. O. S. System that was there. So with when I came in we started looking at uh magazine which which is a web based uh Crn and defy which is a you know web based L. O. S. So those type of things is what we started implementing when we got here because everything a lot of things that we were doing, we were doing, you know, manual uh as opposed to automated as opposed to
Graeme Gilovitz	technology and so on that journey. If you’re moving everything from manual to digital, what was that adoption like from your own staff? And how quickly did you see the impact on your customers experience?
Armando Hidalgo	It was it was great because some of the uh of course when I got here, you know, any time that you have a uh you know, change of regime here, you you also have, you know, you have fall off and then you have new growth. Well the the vintage that the, you know, the vintage people that stayed here, the legacy people have stayed here. They actually really, really appreciated. You know, things get easier such as the phone system such as a computer system, the uh accessing the accounts, talking to customers information of where it was placed. It was something that a lot of folks that were here, they’re like, wow, this is really, really, this is nice. And of course with anything new uh when you roll it out, you roll out the end product. Uh so the end product that we did roll out was uh it was it wasn’t widely embraced by everybody because it’s like this is so easy, I don’t have to dial a phone anymore and I don’t have to head set to my, you know, with my shoulder into my ear. You know, actually we did headsets uh web based. Uh they really, really appreciate it and not only did they see a lift and and the production overall, but they were able to see what they individually were doing. Uh and the auto finance industry, you know the nature of the beast here is very competitive. It is a very, very competitive environment you have that, you know, you have people looking and say, what am I working with? This used to have a lot, you know, my phone’s broken. You know, it doesn’t dial out and you know, as opposed to now, it’s like, well if there was an issue, we could fix it by the way. It was usually getting the uh, in the uh, settings correct on the phone. That’s really the major problem that we had.
Eytan Morgenstern	And how about from the, you know, your customers obviously, you know, once you change things internally, how you’re running things internally and externally, how did customers store to start seeing the process?
Armando Hidalgo	They started seeing a little bit and this is this is something that, you know, it was, it was a double edged sword. Uh someone’s like, wow, we didn’t, we we never heard from platinum this often or you know, it’s like
Eytan Morgenstern	and
Armando Hidalgo	others were, it’s others were like, wow, you know, this is very professional because along with the tech came the opportunity to also revamped the approach to customer service um a compliant you know, quality and of course goes hand in hand with quality with the Qs uh with your, you know every area with the with the originations with the funding, with the servicing with the loss mitigation uh up to you know, everything was very compliant, you know, as far as what we were doing and how we were setting this up.
Graeme Gilovitz	Yeah. That’s amazing because you know from my experience dealing with auto lenders, you know, it’s really extremely competitive market and obviously in the last year it’s been fluctuating up and down. But it’s also one of the because of the digital nature of it now, it also has one of the highest risks of fraud. So it’s a double edged sword. You want to increase your you want to be good with your customers, increase your revenues close the deals. But you also have to be very, very mindful of the risk out there. So having the right tools is obviously very, very critical these days for both your more point your for your staff.
Armando Hidalgo	Yes, certainly. It’s tell me
Graeme Gilovitz	sorry, I’m going to apologize.
Armando Hidalgo	No. I was gonna say, you know, you know you, you mentioned fraud. It’s funny that, you know, we rely, you know, a lot of technology. But you know, I’ve said this before, you know, I’m old school. You know, I’ll ask a question. You know, uh, if I if you have a, if you just detect something that doesn’t seem right, you know, very easy. You know what’s your zodiac time? This is he just,
Eytan Morgenstern	I don’t know. You
Armando Hidalgo	know that’s funny.
Eytan Morgenstern	I get a loan.
Graeme Gilovitz	That’s alone. That’s a great question that give me the name of someone that was born on your birthday. I think most people know that that’s a good one. Tell me when you’re looking, when you’re looking to build out a new tech stack and also when you’re looking at the situation with hurricanes, Two questions, all I guess rolled into one. Did you look at any other companies and say they are best practice or I like what they do And second of all running off that is compared to other companies based in the region. Do you think a large number are hurricane prepared? What do you think that there’s still this? Um, there’s a lack of momentum there and preparedness?
Armando Hidalgo	Well that is, that’s, that, that in itself is what we were looking at. We were looking at one is affordability. Okay. And you know, reliability, you know, how portable is it and how reliable is it? Okay. Do I think that well from experience now I know for a fact that the natural disaster planning contingency plan that we have here, it was, it was, I don’t know maybe because it was developed Right, it’s 2000, I mean we actually uh modeled it, tested it and Late 2018, but in 2019 we really really ramped up the testing and development on that with the, with our stay at home moms or single single parents which you know, they they had requested this and we said this is a great platform to test this, to test this model. And we did, we actually had seven test models that were out there. We saw immediate improvement in production, you know, and abandoned rates were lowered and you know, you’re talking about extended interaction times, um, those type of things, it was getting more done and, and you know, one of the questions I asked is that, you know, can you share, you know, you know, while being in the office is this and you’re at home and it’s this. And it was funny that they, it’s because the time that was that they were logged in was dedicated to that without any outside noise or distractions, Which is something that, that helped greatly. And when we did this in 2019, we ran that used pretty much through uh, all of at the end of 2018, all the way through the summer of 2019. Um, which is, you know, it gave us a really, really good data to a point to where we incorporated into the weekend work, you know, uh, instead of
Graeme Gilovitz	having a broad and that’s what’s so interesting to me I’m under is because like I said earlier, I think when I listen to some of the podcast that you’ve been on in interviews, you talk about how well you adjusted to work from home when Covid came through. And, and it sounds like you were like at least at least 7 to 9 months ahead of the game because of the fact that you were already rolled out this program and successfully piloted, Like you said, you had mothers working from home, single parents working from home. You’re already working in this manner. So I would assume that probably working into Covid didn’t change that much for your team other than, you know, a little bit more, maybe mars squaring hand sanitizing and just a more controlling those people that were previously disposed towards going to the office as opposed to working from home.
Armando Hidalgo	Mm And it was it was the scariest scary times when it first came around. Um yeah, when, when you ask that if other companies, you know, in the, in the demographic, I really don’t think that people were prepared. Uh, they had a contingency plan. The thing is that, you know, just with anything when you don’t use it, you know, develops dust, you know, so a lot of companies had to, you know, reducing and also the, the framework of production and scheduling things of that nature. We, this is I think that that was the nuances that we were able to shift. Um, I know that it took us when we actually decided like, you know, press the button red button to say, okay, we’re going to work from home. We actually were up and running the entire staff was up and running within two hours. Um, it was, I think that the most wait,
Eytan Morgenstern	let me, I, I don’t understand you, Corona comes, we’re all sort of figure what’s going on. You made decision now, I’m working from home in two hours. You made a decision and you’re all set up. Yes,
Armando Hidalgo	Yes, and that was
Eytan Morgenstern	like special forces, That’s amazing,
Armando Hidalgo	yep. And it was, it was all, it was all, it was all, it all came together when, when we said, okay, this is what we need. The packages were complete, they were like little briefcase is that, you know, had all the, the pieces for them to set up a workstation at home. So this was our new tech stack that afforded us to do this because, you know, we did not miss a beat. As a matter of fact, We had more, we saw more production in the 1st 90 days of working from home and it was it was great, I think, you know like we set up to two hours. It there was the first person, the person that lived the furthest from here. She lived about I guess about an hour away. And she was the last one that was actually logged on. But it wasn’t we we we we looked at it, We dismissed the entire staff at 12:30 PM and by 2 30 to 45 we had everybody pretty much back up and running.
Graeme Gilovitz	Oh that is absolutely incredible. And and that’s and and that’s that is just when you think about the fact that you already pre planned and you had all these contingencies. It just makes me as a foreigner and I think about the natural disasters that you go through. I don’t understand why more businesses are not set up like this. What what advice could you be giving to other businesses that are now sitting in your post covid or as we start to maybe potentially exit out of it, What would be your advice to those other people and what are the key lessons that you’ve you’ve taken out of this process, you can share with them?
Armando Hidalgo	Yes, it’s it’s it’s funny because as we this pandemic starts to wind down, uh you know, there’s a new norm that’s out there, there’s a new new way of doing things, life as we know it is different and a lot of aspects, things could events still continue to change uh and and challenge or market, you know, with this chip situation and the vehicles, you know, that’s just created, you know, a different uh different type of approach to things. So uh as with everything, when you develop a model, you always want to make sure that you tested that you you put it to, you try to break it, you know and if you can break it then that’s the opportunity that you can learn from and improve your systems and and your operations. Uh but if you know you can’t break it pretty much. You continue to uh just with like a computer, you continue updating and you continue developing and keeping that thing to part keeping your plan, keeping your your text, keeping all your operations to part. one of the things that I I don’t see is that something I kind of uh in tune with you know keep my my finger to the policy an ear to the ground. Is that there is not enough revisit their you know companies are not revisiting their their contingency plan. Uh We’ve we practiced the what called pace. You have a primary plan, you have an alternate plan, you have a contingency planning and you have an emergency plan. Uh Those things checked off when I think they should be checked on a quarterly basis. Uh Just in case anything happens here in in in florida. Hurricane season starts June one all the way to November 30. We’ve already had two named hurricanes or tropical storms that have not developed yet. But those are some of the things that it allows us time to say, Okay, how’s our plan? How’s everybody doing? Everybody’s systems are up and running.
Armando Hidalgo	Is everything working? Everything is up to par with our vendors, with, you know, with our support staffs, things of that nature. Because we also uh included the uh is something that continue to harp on with our uh Crm and R. L. O. S. What type of contingency plan do you have? Because I can’t afford to have, you know, people ready to work and then the system, you know what I’m trying to work with isn’t working. So always your contingency plans with your vendors. Uh We had a situation where We lost four hours, I guess this was pre pandemic and it’s something that not only did I inquire about this, I followed up with it and I asked, okay, well we’ve identified, you know, we’ve identified an opportunity here. You know, I’d like to know what the solution is. And did it work? Did that fix work? Uh It’s just continued continued following up.
Eytan Morgenstern	I think those are some really great tips um you know, sharpening the saw, essentially sharpening the saw and always revisiting and and looking at what we could do to improve and making sure that, you know, if we put lead in last year’s, it’s still relevant this year. Just continue to do that, not assuming the best, assuming that the worst could come.
Graeme Gilovitz	Yeah, and I think that in today’s day and age it’s we’ve just been proved that natural disasters are not only continuing, but they’re getting more intense as a, as a former text. And you know, I was always shocked to hear about the big freeze earlier this year, where there were people, there were out hot water, electricity and gas. What is it that I find that still mind boggling in the 21st century, but then you’ve got the technologies threats today with cyber hacking and everything that’s going on there were constantly being attacked were under threat everywhere. It’s a question of making sure that we’re constantly ahead of the game rather than trying to prevent it rather than trying to cure it. I think that’s the main main game today.
Eytan Morgenstern	Yeah, So Before we sort of bring this to an end, we have a few rapid fire questions, just a little on section here. Um, so you’re gonna give us, we’ll give you.4 seconds for each one. Well, whatever whatever you got. Um Okay, you ready to go? Sure. Thank you. Okay, I’ll take the first one here. So tell me about a recent or favorite person you’re following on social media, like, Linkedin, twitter,
Armando Hidalgo	john Maxwell,
Eytan Morgenstern	john Maxwell. Okay. In up to three words. The best part of your job
Armando Hidalgo	making a difference.
Eytan Morgenstern	Great. Apple or android
Armando Hidalgo	android.
Graeme Gilovitz	Good answer.
Eytan Morgenstern	Okay, this is the most important question digitization or digitalization.
Armando Hidalgo	Did you take digital digital civilization?
Eytan Morgenstern
Graeme Gilovitz	Let me rephrase that in, in Australian english because it’s a little bit easier digitization or digitalization.
Eytan Morgenstern	Jackson. So helpful.
Graeme Gilovitz	All
Eytan Morgenstern	right, move it on. Yeah, that’s
Graeme Gilovitz	what, that’s how we felt. and and and
Eytan Morgenstern	The final or the final one. The future is fill in the blank
Armando Hidalgo	filled with opportunities.
Graeme Gilovitz	Wonderful. Armando! Thank you so much for your time today. I’m sure that our podcast listeners will really enjoy listening to us and sharing and hearing your uh your experience pre pandemic during pandemic. We really appreciate it. And I look forward to catching up with you soon.