Canadian auto dealer interviewed more than two dozen exhibitors attending the Automotive Conference & Expo (ACE) event last week and company representatives talked about what they are promoting this year.
The event was organized by the Motor Vehicle Retailers of Ontario (MVRO) and Consolidated Dealers, and featured two days of conference sessions, breakout workshops, and a full trade show floor filled with the leading suppliers serving Canada’s automotive retail sector.
Read our comprehensive story to find out who’s who in the supplier world, and learn more about their latest product and service offerings.
SymTech Dealer Services
vivi – Virtual Video (Universus)
PBS Systems
CADA 360
Leadbox
Keyloop Canada
A&R Solutions
OPENLANE Canada
Hunter Engineering
DSMA
CARFAX
SiriusXM
AutoSync/TRADER
Tag Tracking
Scotiabank
Manheim Canada
Kijiji Autos
TireLink Canada
Consolidated Collision Service
PureCars
MNP
Autocorp.AI
AutoVerify
SymTech Dealer Services
David Mildenberger, VP Sales Ontario and Eastern Canada
We always want to support the dealer associations. This is an important event for MVRO and we also have a longstanding relationship with Consolidated Dealers. We are delivering two messages to dealers at ACE. One is the key fundamental that we train by showing rather than telling, and that makes us different in the marketplace. We’re able to go into dealerships and take deals and train the people that way to say, okay, ‘watch me take the turnover with our four- step process.’ Then we give them tips, and that’s different training than our competitors. We’re also here today to talk about the next generation of F&I technology — and that’s daveplus. It’s geared toward the buyer that doesn’t want to spend too much time in the dealership, or come to the business office to do the deal. With the daveplus platform, it’s all done on an iPad. It’s not your typical 45 minutes in the business office going product by product. We ask a lot of questions, and then it uses prescriptive selling based on the answers you gave in the interview. The algorithm actually helps determine what would be best for the consumer. The younger generation in particular is quite used to that with recommendations from Amazon or Netflix.
vivi – Virtual Video (Universus)
Kristina Alexiou, VP Client Success
ACE was a great show. We introduced vivi — a new service for dealers to help them create video content for their websites and social channels. Dealers know that video is their most powerful customer conversion tool. That was 100% backed up by what we heard in some of the sessions at ACE by Matthew Growden, from Google Canada. Matthew also highlighted that dealers aren’t using video enough, which highlights the challenge vivi is intended to address. Simply put, it’s not easy to produce video cost-effectively at high frequency alongside all the other responsibilities dealers’ digital marketing teams have. This is where vivi can help. We give your digital marketing staff a resource that helps them affordably produce more video, more often. In effect, it expands your own team. Vivi is flexible, letting dealers decide between self-shooting footage that vivi edits, or bringing our team in to acquire the footage. And vivi integrates advanced AI tools for idea generation, scripting and voiceover to make content creation truly cost-effective. ACE gave us a great opportunity for one-on-one conversations with dealers where we walked them through vivi. They really leaned into the conversations, which was great to see.
PBS Systems
Matthew Billings, Regional Manager, DMS Sales
I think one of the differences with what we do on the dealership software side, is the fact that it’s one single platform. With a lot of companies you have your DMS, then you have your CRM, and then you have web appointments, you have tire storage, you have e-commerce, and they’re all independent products. You’re adding on a lot of bolt-on pieces of software. With PBS it’s all one single platform, so you’re not having to go to third party vendors. PBS is also really one of the few companies in this industry that’s actually gone through the process of rebuilding their software from scratch. So it’s a brand new piece of software. It’s not a new graphical overlay. It’s really taking a look at what a piece of DMS software actually needs to be in the modern age versus what it was back in the nineties. So it is very unique from that point of view and just fundamentally the way it’s designed. I think that’s honestly why we’ve had so much success. When I started with PBS 17 years ago, we had roughly about 500 dealers. Today we have 2,800 dealerships. We’re onboarding over 200 new stores every year, and it’s been a huge Canadian success story.
CADA 360
Cindy Robinson, Director, Governance & Plan Management, CADA 360
We were happy to chat with dealer members at ACE and to support the MRVO’s conference and trade show. When we talk with dealers at our booth about CADA 360 services, first and foremost we tell them that when they join our programs it funds CADA’s advocacy work for dealers. I think that’s a really important piece, But I also think it’s the best benefit program for dealers — designed by dealers, for dealers. We constantly have them review the programs to ensure that we’re meeting the new and upcoming needs of dealers as things change. CADA 360 offers dealers programs like employee benefits, garage insurance, home and auto, HR Automation and retirement savings programs. Dealers can pick and choose which programs make sense for their dealerships. There’s a lot of flexibility for them to design programs that fit their needs. We’re working hard to build brand awareness and to educate benefit administrators about our programs. We’re starting to develop webinars, and we’re sending out a lot of communications to the benefit administrators, along with employee communication, for them to be able to educate their employees.
Leadbox
Ian Cruickshank, President and CEO
Leadbox has been in the space since 2011 as a website and technology company for dealers, and we’ve been providing managed marketing services. But what we’re talking about the most at ACE is new products that we’ve brought to market in the last six months. One thing that Leadbox is outstanding with is integrations. That positioned us very well to use AI, large language model learning technology to be able to combine that with our ability to integrate. We take all the DMS information that’s available on any vehicle and put that through a process to engineer that information into a question for large language model AI into the API for ChatGPT. We get the output, which is a perfectly written vehicle description. Most dealers don’t love writing vehicle descriptions, whether it’s new or used. So we’ve built out a new product that enables them to very quickly plug that into their system to be able to export and create a perfectly worded vehicle description and put that back into their vehicle detail pages.Those are being syndicated to the third party listings environments and because they have better worded descriptions, they’re seeing an increase in lead traffic. The other product we launched is called High Beam that helps dealers identity which vehicle listings are getting the least amount of traffic, and making sure they get the attention they need.
Keyloop Canada
Michael Bacon, Central Regional Director of Sales
Our motto has been focusing on experiences. Is the purchaser having a good experience at the dealership? Most of the landscape is an equal playing field, with most of the research being done at home. But when they come into the dealership, it’s the experience that’s going to make a difference for them. So we’re trying to show how having a unified database and constant communications with your customers can increase the customer experience. Keyloop is comprised of both Rapid RTC from Winnipeg and also Serti DMS from Montreal. The whole idea of Serti and Rapid RTC joining together with Keyloop is to expand, but also to eliminate third parties and streamline all the processes into one data core so that it’s a lot easier to access. You have a full 360 degree view of the customer. Keyloop Leads and Keyloop Chat has had a worldwide presence for quite some time, and is very much the top tier of any chat or lead management system. We use a unified database to communicate to your customers and offer the opportunity for good experiences through high-end communications. It’s been very well received by the dealers.
A&R Solutions
Alexandria Buonopane, Sales Representative
We’re showcasing our managed services. We do full managed IT support for hundreds of dealerships across Canada. What we find is that a lot of dealers are sometimes embarrassed to admit that they have had a cyber threat, so they don’t always go through the correct protocols. So we always want to make sure that we’re assisting dealerships, making sure that they have the correct services in place, and just taking the proper precautions against cyber threats and just being transparent. Dealerships are getting more and more affected. Dealerships are one of the best places to get data from because you have customers’ social insurance numbers, their financial data, their driver’s license number, emails, phone numbers, addresses, how much they make, where they work. So it’s really critical to make sure that you have everything in place to protect that data. A lot of dealers, especially smaller dealers, tend to think that nobody will go after them — until someone does. Then, they obviously understand the threat more. So it’s definitely something that I think everyone should be aware of and basically do the best they can at preventing anything from happening. And not only just preventing, just lessening the damage if a cyber threat does occur.
OPENLANE Canada
Chris Stickley, VP of Inside Dealer Sales
The OPENLANE story really started back many years ago when Peter Kelly, our current CEO, started a company called ATC. It quickly evolved into an online captive finance wholesale marketplace where captive finance customers could sell off lease vehicles and we’d find buyers for them. Then through evolution and through acquisitions, the ADESA legacy brand came on board and became part of the family. Then the TradeRev 45-minute auction digital platform came on board and it blended into this. That has evolved as OPENLANE to become this full service marketplace where we bring all of our buyers and sellers into one platform. Gone are the days where you have to toggle between a digital platform and a physical auction platform. We’ve removed that barrier and now we bring over 60,000 vehicles every month and over 15,000 unique buyers and sellers together in one single seamless platform where they can transact. That’s the beauty of what we’re presenting here at ACE, is the all-new redesign revamped OPENLANE where we have brought those different channels together into one seamless, efficient experience. Our purpose is we make wholesale easy so our customers can be more successful.
Hunter Engineering
Dan Martin, Division Manager
What we are showcasing at ACE is our inspection equipment. We recognize the number one defection point for service at dealerships is tires. That’s when dealerships lose customers. We’re really focusing on keeping those customers in-house because we know that 75% of customers purchase their tires from the first place that recommends them. So it’s really focused on inspecting every tire — every time the customer comes in so we can present those results and then make the right recommendations and keep those customers in the service bay at the dealership. Our automated inspection technology checks the tire tread, and our Quick Check Drive checks the alignment. Dealerships are losing a lot of business in alignment opportunities, which if we find those alignment opportunities and we correct them, we save the tire wear, and we save fuel consumption. The system generates a printout for customers to see and it shows them the actual tire condition, and shows the type of wear that you might get if you don’t correct the situation. But we also encourage the service advisors to show every result so customers know, ‘hey, we checked it, everything is good.’ You can feel comfortable, your car is properly aligned, your tires are in good shape. It just builds that trust with the customer and it gives them a reason to come back.
DSMA
Lev Kowalsky, Senior Associate
Today we’re the largest mergers and acquisitions company that focuses on the automotive industry, or what I consider transportation retail. That also includes truck dealers, marine dealers, power sports and RV dealers. People look at us as an M&A company, but everything we do starts with a valuation. We’ve done 1,700+ valuations to date and over 400 transactions in the automotive space. We’re specialized, we understand the KPIs, we understand the nature of the automotive world and it allows us to really focus on what we do. It’s not like one day we’re doing a valuation on a pharmaceutical company or on a manufacturing company. The ebbs and flows of our industry are constant, and there are always changes. Obviously with the increase in interest rates and lending costs, we are seeing the timelines taking a little bit longer to close because the banks are changing their rates on a regular basis. But right now, I think we’ve got 70 plus dealers that we’re currently working with on the sell side and probably another 40 on the valuation side. So I think the industry is still very, very strong on mergers and acquisitions. But I do see that buyers are a little more tempered when it comes to the decisions they’re making on the acquisitions. Obviously, the banks are playing a major role in those transactions because they’re not lending as much as they were.
CARFAX
Bryan Bota, Director of Dealer Sales
There has been a lot of change in the industry, and CARFAX is proud to be at ACE again this year as one of the presenting sponsors. We are here to continue to build relationships with our customers and talk about our valuation products. We’ve got a new VVR tool this year that’s based on history based value. So we’re able to provide dealers, based on the vehicle history, which CARFAX is known for, with our history report. So it helps dealers better appraise vehicles and put better pricing on vehicles. That’s our main focus here this year. And then just make new connections and support the industry. It’s a resilient industry with resilient dealers. So I think things keep moving pretty well, even amongst all the challenges. So I think there’s a lot of optimism and a lot of positivity that dealers and customers have. So we’re happy to help and support anything that our customers need. We just recently launched a snapshot tool that embeds the CARFAX report into dealer listings, so customers can easily see the report and a snapshot of all the information. It helps dealers bring more transparent information to customers, which is one of the key CARFAX values.
SiriusXM
Mike Mazgay, VP Automotive Remarketing & Dealer Operations
One of the things that we’re doing this year at ACE is getting back to the basics. For the last 10 years, we’ve been promoting our Service Lane and our Pre-Owned programs — and now we’re going full circle. We’re really focusing on our product, our content, and our new technology right now. And the big star is 360L. It gives users a whole new personalized experience. It is an absolutely fantastic product rolling out in many vehicles. We want the dealers to understand that this technology is either in their vehicles now, or is coming soon in their vehicles. The rich user experience in the 360L product is unrivaled. We have a demo product here that we are taking dealers through. One of the things that I find with dealers is they need to be comfortable with the product, because it is a very in-depth product. If they’re comfortable with the product, then they’re going to make sure that they mention it to their consumer and demo the product. One of the things that really differentiates us from the competition is the exploration piece. It’s fantastic to listen to your own content and the stuff that you know you like, but what about the stuff that you don’t know you like? And that’s really key because you can learn about new artists by using the 360L product and then all of a sudden you become a fan of the product.
AutoSync/TRADER
Mustafa Oweida, National Sales Manager
We’re incredibly excited to be here at ACE. The turnout is outstanding, and it’s nice to be among our Canadian dealers. We’re part of TRADER Corporation, and AutoSync is our software as a service (SaaS) SAAS suite of products. Canadians are looking for a more seamless consumer journey across the board. We’re providing our dealers an omni-channel solution to help them optimize the operational aspects of their business as well as drive up profitability. We’re bridging all the gaps of our SaaS products and putting them all in one and integrating them into one holistic solution with our TRFFK for digital advertising, TAdvantage for websites, Activix CRM, vAuto, Easy Deal for desking and MOTOInsight for digital retailing. Dealers were overwhelmed by the amount of SaaS products out in the market for automotive. So when this huge acquisition by TRADER was announced, it helped dealers look at a one-stop shop. Dealers say they are excited to now have one solution and one company manage all SaaS products versus having to buy solutions from so many different vendors.
Tag Tracking
Richard Cleroux, Director of Sales
Our company has been in business for more than 10 years, and in that time we’ve recovered more than $1 million dollars worth of stolen cars. We came to the show, because we know that there’s a big problem with car theft in Toronto. The Tag tracking system is three things: It’s prevention, electronic application, and tracking. We put our logo on the front windshield of a car to show thieves that there is a tracking device in the car. There’s no need to steal it, because I’m going to go and get it back. The next thing we do is we put nano tags inside the vehicle. They look like tiny grains of rice, and they have RFID. We also put between four and eight tracking devices. We don’t put the same amount, because then thieves don’t know how many to look for. We could drop them in the frame, they won’t be able to take them out. As a joke, when people ask me, what’s your recovery rate? I say, I think it’s 104%. Because when we find a car and open a container, we find the car with our Tag in it, along with other cars with no Tags!
Scotiabank
Adam Weir, Director and Market Lead
It’s been great being here at ACE. We really appreciate the opportunity to be a sponsor. We’re here with our Scotia Womens’ Initiative, which is a program that focuses on female entrepreneurs. And so we’re here in conjunction with ACE to show support for that and show support for the auto business. The Scotia Womens’ Initiative is a program by the bank to help female entrepreneurs through mentorship, guidance, personal development, and really help showcase their full potential. We’ve been in the business for over 60 years. We do commercial banking solutions for automobile dealers and also we do retail financing on retail contracts for their customers that are coming into the dealership. There’s lots of challenges in the marketplace these days. Dealers are finding new ways to do things, learning, meeting new partners, meeting different folks that are working on different things to help innovate and change the way they do business. It’s going to be another exciting year ahead of us, and so we’re looking to be there to help support our clients.
Manheim Canada
Gerry Johnson, Regional Sales Director
Matt Trapp, Regional VP, East
Gerry: It’s been a year since the divestment of some of the business units under Cox Automotive, so people have been wanting to see what’s happening there: what’s life been like for Manheim? The transition over the last year has been amazing since we now report to the U.S. team. They invested $2.5 million in digital operations, tons of new products, which has been great. We’ve gotten a lot of support from the U.S. and best practices and things that are working in the U.S. From a dealer consignment perspective, we’re seeing about 38% growth year over year. That’s heavily based on opening the lanes, offering dealers different types of services, vehicle reconditioning, all that kind of stuff. So it’s been really good. Matt: The Manheim brand is one the dealers know and trust. It had been a little bit neglected up north of the border. We brought together a lot of our U.S. resources, and we Canadianized it for them. We then really just gave them a lot of wind in their sails to help them go to market and just reinvigorate the business, letting the dealers know that, we’re here, we are doing business, we are driving cars in the lanes, we are wide open and we’re welcoming them back. And it’s been an amazing first year doing that.
Kijiji Autos
Carolyn MacSween, Regional Ontario Sales Manager
We were the sponsors of the demo theater, which is pretty awesome. We talked about Lead Driver Bundle, which is our new product. It includes credit, trade-in and chat, and we’re partnered with AutoVerify, TD Auto Finance, LivePerson and Equifax. The value of that for dealers is that having the trade-in tool on their VDP, if they decide to add the product to their suite of tools on Kijiji Autos, a customer can come to their VDP, and get the value of their car. The dealer then gets that information in their inbox and it’s information ahead of the conversation that they’re having with the potential lead. Shopper uncertainty is super high right now, and they’re looking to marketplaces for information. We did third party research with a company called Brand Spark, and we found out about the market now and consumers who are shopping for cars. They really need information about what they’re looking for, and if you can provide that at the marketplace level where they’re shopping, then so much the better and good things happen.
TireLink Canada
Kim Geroux, Director of Sales
Chelsea McDonald, Director of Sales, Alliance
We are the largest distributor of tires in Canada. Dealerships need to start focusing on how to sell tires. EVs are coming fast and furious and the tire component of the dealership business is becoming more and more crucial. There’s the initial purchase of a car, and you need to consider which tires are important to the performance of your car. But then there’s other areas within the dealership that we touch. So within service for example, we need to help them educate their customers as they come through the drive-through on the value of getting their tires done at the dealership. Things like oil changes and the other ways dealerships make their money today through service is going to look completely different in the coming years. The main component is going to be tires. EV vehicles are between 30-40% heavier and they have instantaneous torque. They’re burning through rubber very quickly, which is why we are tasked with making sure our dealers understand how to sell those tires, how to sell those vehicles and equip those customers with the right tires.
Consolidated Collision Service
Mike Beier, General Manager
We are a collision network for new car dealers. So if you are a new car dealer, and have a body shop anywhere in the country, we want to talk to you. And really our pitch is three things: We’re going to help you with customer retention. We’re going to help you improve performance and profitability of your body shop, and we’re going to bring cars to the door from our insurance partners. We’ve now got over 85 locations across the country. We do nearly $300 million a year in collision sales. It’s been a really good journey. The average Repair Order has gone up, it’s now over $5,000. So there’s huge demand and a lack of really qualified facilities to do the work. So we think we’re in a good position. It was nice this year to be here and just be a part of ACE and be a part of the big show and see all the dealers and take part in the training and hear the speakers. Everybody’s saying what a great show it is. Good people are here, there’s good energy and good engagement.
PureCars
Steve Kisic, National Sales Manager
PureCars is a multi-channel digital advertising and lead generation solution that’s built specifically for dealerships and for dealer groups. We work with all media channel partners, Google, Microsoft Meta, Amazon, Spotify, YouTube. Any sort of need that a dealership may have in terms of digital advertising across multi channels — we can get them there. We basically give them a marketing team that works on behalf of their dealership and our KPIs are basically lead generation and high quality website traffic. Each dealer’s objectives and definitions of success look a little bit differently. And so we need to refine our strategy to help them achieve those goals based around the solutions that we know have worked well in the past for many of our other dealers right across the country. We have inventory feeds that we get the inventory every single day to understand their new used and certified pre-owned inventory. We understand if there’s been any price drops as well for those specific units. So we can advertise price drop alerts across the display and social network, which is unique to PureCars as well as we tap into the dealership’s DMS information as well.
MNP
Chris Schaufele, National Leader, Dealership Services
We’ve got our MNP digital team here at ACE putting on a couple of exciting workshops. One of them is on the Canadian Digital Adoption Plan, which is a really unique program that a lot of dealers aren’t aware of. It’s a government funded program that gives you a $15,000 grant to hire a digital consultant to come into your business, look under the hood, do a bit of an analysis of the technology that you’ve got deployed in your dealership, and give you recommendations on how to further advance technologically or put new systems in place. Then once that process is done, it gives you access to a $100,000 interest-free loan to actually implement the pieces of the plan. The government’s trying to encourage businesses to advance technologically and improve their competitiveness. Our digital team is also putting on a presentation on cybersecurity and how to safeguard the digital assets that the dealers have. It seems like a great group of people here at ACE. We’ve connected with a decent number already. There are a lot of other industry players here as well, and a lot of key folks that work in the industry that it’s great to be here and connect with.
Autocorp.AI
Andrew Lemoine, Founder & CEO
Kole Hicks, Co-Founder & CRO
Andrew: We’re on a mission to digitize all things credit and finance and change the way that dealers approach digital finance. We started off on a mission to make credit more accessible. We recognized that our industry was always credit last. Credit was only introduced late in the transaction, often consumers were sold something they couldn’t afford. Consumers are shopping blind, and dealers are desking blind. That just sets everybody up for failure. We launched Auto Corp with our initial flagship product called AVA Credit — and we’ve kind of been nicknamed the ‘Credit Karma’ of the auto industry because really what we did was we took something that was traditionally done post-transaction in more of a hard pull finance portal environment, and we brought it upfront online and we made it a consumer-driven interaction. When a consumer is shopping on a dealer’s website, they can easily find out their buying power, and then proceed with more confidence. It also gives dealers all that credit data upfront. Kole: There’s a misconception that people only fill out credit apps when they know they don’t have good credit. Our tools give consumers the ability to handle their fear: can I get approved? How will this affect me? Is it too expensive? The transparency of the product, showing your probability of being able to get approved has actually helped us increase the amount of prime applications that we see. So we’re seeing about 65% prime customers filling out our tool.
AutoVerify
Keith Murray, CEO
At AutoVerify, we enable dealership websites via our tools to provide information to their consumers. So whether it’s looking for their trade-in value, or looking for their credit score. We’ve just launched a new tool, partnered with TD and Equifax, where they can pre-qualify and actually make an offer for a particular vehicle. A lot of consumers are nervous about their credit worthiness, so what this does is let them know which vehicles will be available to them based on their situation. From a dealer’s perspective, now it gives them more information about the customer and the lead. It also allows the finance manager to know if they’ve been approved or advanced approval for a certain amount, what back-end products can I include in the deal or work into the deal. Our company started with reviews, moved into trade, and now we’ve got a full suite of products, including websites. We also have an e-commerce workflow, and in dealership tools as well, like a desking platform. We’ve got a consumer experience platform for working on the sales floor with customers. So we’re kind of a one-stop shop and we’re trying to help dealers engage with their customer however they want you to.
