How it works
Five steps, in the order an F&I manager already works. Nothing is submitted and nothing is decided without a person clicking the button.
Step 1
A printed bureau from Dealertrack, RouteOne or the bureau’s own site, as a PDF or an image. FirstLook pulls the fields a lender will read and shows them back to you on one screen, so you can fix anything it misread before the deal goes further.
If the file carries a freeze, a fraud alert, an active duty alert, or a name and address that do not match the application, that comes up first. There is no point ranking lenders for a file that cannot be pulled.
Step 2
Vehicle, mileage, selling price, trade allowance and payoff, cash down, taxes and fees, backend products, requested term. Then income and how it is proven, housing payment, time on the job and time at the address.
From that, FirstLook works out loan to value on each lender’s book, payment to income at each lender’s rate, and debt to income with the trade’s payment removed once it pays off. The same deal produces a different loan to value at a lender that uses J.D. Power trade than at one that uses KBB retail, and FirstLook keeps those apart.
Step 3
Proof of income, proof of residence, phone, insurance, licence, references. You tick what is in the folder. A lender that needs two pay stubs at this score when only one is on file comes back as workable rather than ready, with the missing item named.
Step 4
Each lender in your lineup is checked against its own sheet and sorted into three groups.
Under each lender you see the buy rate for the tier, the adders that apply, the acquisition fee and the expected payment. Click any number and it shows the line on the rate sheet it came from.
Step 5
FirstLook does not connect to Dealertrack or RouteOne and does not send applications. You take the ranking and submit through the platform you already use. When the decisions come back you can log them, and over time the library shows where a lender’s written sheet and its actual decisions differ.
Limits
It does not pull credit. It does not submit. It does not approve or decline. It does not talk to the customer. It does not replace the relationship between an F&I manager and a buyer at a lender who will stretch on a good customer. What it does is get the first submission to the right desk, with the paperwork that desk is going to ask for.
Send a redacted bureau, the structure and the sheets for the lenders you sent it to. We will show you what FirstLook would have said before you submitted.