In the latest in Automotive Management’s ‘5 Minutes With…’ series of automotive retail supplier features, deputy editor Aimée Turner caught-up with Bumper’s head of sales Dan Christie.
Automotive fintech business Bumper’s unique AI technology enables real-time financing decisions, thereby making it easier for customers to take their cars for repairs and services, and dealers to attract customers.
Bumper delivered record revenues of £11.7 million in 2023, marking a 54% increase year-on-year and a 90% surge in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), with £211m worth of car repairs. The business said it was on track to more than double that to approximately £460m by the end of 2024, bolstered its acquisition of intelligence tools provider AutoBI.
Telford-based AutoBI, generates critical insights through web-based dashboards that provide near real-time updates across various business functions, including CRM, sales, service, parts and finance and now offers enhanced insights and data transparency to Bumper’s network of dealer partners.
Bumper now works with over 5,000 dealerships and garages across the UK, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, and the Republic of Ireland, helping over 600,000 drivers manage servicing and repair payments through its PayLater, PayNow, and PayPad services. Bumper’s client roster also includes major brands such as Ford, Volkswagen, Nissan, Volvo, Seat, Skoda, Audi, JLR, and Porsche.
2023 saw a £40m Series B fundraise from Autotech Ventures, Shell Ventures, JLR’s InMotion Ventures and Porsche Ventures. Bumper has since raised a further £2m through Suzuki Global Ventures and Marubeni Ventures to take total investment to £55m to accelerate its scaled growth across Europe.
How do you see the automotive fintech landscape performing in 2025, and where does Bumper fit into this?
Dan Christie It is performing very positively especially as a lot of businesses look to digitise and to digitalise processes and streamline processes. We are taking on a lot of feedback from our retail and OEM partners, and they’re definitely embracing a number of our new products and ideas.
We’re very much known as a ‘buy now, pay later’ product for aftersales, but we’re now doing a lot more funding, for example, in sales departments as well, in terms of value-added products such as helping the penetration of warranty sales and paint protection.
In terms of actually embedding into digitalization, we’ve grown our partnerships team massively and we now integrate close to 50 different partners, whether platforms, vehicle health check or DMS systems. We had a huge DMS project in 2024 which has been very successful and we’ve got another one that we’re currently working on in 2025 which again will be huge.
And then the final part, the tech element, is in terms of apps, such as OEM apps where we can potentially help with payment which is really exciting. Live testing has been conducted in the last couple of weeks for a large OEM, so hopefully that will go live .
Bumper last year said its GMV was set to double in 2024. Did the business achieve this and what are your key strategies to sustain this level of growth in 2025?
Dan Christie We had an incredibly strong 2024. We were in the FT1000 fastest growing companies in Europe for the fourth year in a row. There’s only around 400 businesses that have been in it for four consecutive years so we’re definitely in for another very strong growth year.
In terms of our key strategies in terms of sustaining that growth, obviously it will become more challenging, certainly in the UK, as we get bigger. We’re now in Ireland, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, and we are doubling down on those. In terms of growth, we should be able to achieve organic growth by adding more retailers, more OEM partners in those markets.
In terms of the UK, there’s a lot on the go, and the biggest thing is the diversification of our product set. We can now provide every payments within a dealership, apart from finance on the forecourt.
So essentially, we’re moving from just a lender to a full payments business. We can provide instant payment, whether that be a link or whether that be via a terminal and we can also offer open banking which is an instant bank to bank transfer. That is a very exciting product, because it saves retailers a lot of money versus traditional card payments.
As part of our DMS project, all payments automatically reconcile back into the dealership’s DMS so Bumper doesn’t just help in terms of the front end for the accounts teams but also the back end. It makes payment much easier and much quicker as well as the obvious benefit, which is having one supplier for everything. We’ve done a lot of work on packaging that, building the infrastructure for it, and being able to go to market with it at the back end of last year. We call the whole product suite Bumper Pro and we’ve had great uptake since it was launched.
In terms of our strategy for this year we plan to onboard as many of our existing partners, offering a number of our different payment options, as opposed to just relying on revenue from buy now, pay later.
How does last November’s acquisition of AutoBI enhance Bumper’s value proposition, and how do you plan to leverage its data capabilities?
Dan Christie Obviously, the acquisition of AutoBI and integrating that into the business is a clear strategy. There are two sides. First of all, it’s a fantastic platform very much in its own right. It gives retailers and OEMs near real time insight into performance and into where any gaps are.
AutoBI can distill huge amounts of data and deliver insights for our retail partners and then obviously action on the back of that. An example could be technician productivity at a time when recruitment is obviously increasingly challenging. We can help retailers to understand if they can be more efficient with existing resources.
Also, in terms of leveraging AutoBI for our wider proposition, it allows us to leverage its huge amounts of data to build really powerful case studies that show the power of our products.
If a retailer can see that there is vehicle health check or safety related work that has not been sold, we can give them that data and show how using products like buy now, pay later may improve their conversion by x per cent.
How do you see the impact of UK macroeconomic factors, such as interest rates and inflation, influencing Bumper’s growth and customer demand in 2025?
Dan Christie Macro economic factors are definitely helping support growth. Ultimately, Bumper offers a much better alternative to costlier lending options, whether it be credit cards and bank loans which is driving demand. Obviously, we’re B2B to C so we have two customers. We have our OEM and retail partners, and then we have the actual drivers and end users.
In terms of our retailer customers, obviously the increase in the Minimum Wage and National Insurance contributions is definitely increasing pressure and we can help mitigate those costs so dealerships can capitalise on their workshop and value-add sales, mitigating a lot of costs which can save retailers tens of thousands of pounds.
What role does AI play in fraud detection and risk assessment within your platform? Do these models need tweaking, depending on national economic headwinds and cost of living impacts?
Dan Christie Risk assessment is ongoing but what is definitely unique to us is the ability – through the vast amount of credit risk and automotive data that we have collected over the last 10 years – to ensure that we are lending responsibly and that we’re making accurate lending decisions so we don’t compromise an applicant’s financial wellbeing.
We regularly reassess and recalibrate our decision and calculations in response to the wider economics and make sure that our lending is affordable for consumers while maintaining high adoption of our product, which obviously is key.
In terms of fraud, we use a number of different datasets provided by credit reference agencies that allow us to match applicant attributes, such as device fingerprint, mobile and email address to inform us about fraudulent behaviour. We are also trialling AI in behavioural analytics to detect fraudulent behaviors such as copy and paste activities or mouse paths.
As a business with an international customer base, how does your AI technology adapt to different market conditions and customer behaviours?
Dan Christie It definitely can’t be ‘drag and drop’, because there are cultural differences, Even so, we are able to leverage AI. We have quite a large AI project around our contact centre which basically frees up teams to be able to spend more time with customers who need dedicated support.
Bumper is backed by investments from numerous car manufacturers, how will these partnerships shape Bumper’s expansion strategy in 2025?
Dan Christie We have some strategic car manufacturer investors: Suzuki, JLR and Porsche and in terms of our go to market strategy in our European markets, they absolutely do help in terms of obviously introducing us to the contacts. That was very much our approach in the early days in the UK, and it’s one that we mirror in those markets.
Do you see the split changing over the next few years in terms of dealership business and then OEM opportunity business?
Dan Christie We’ve always put a huge emphasis on the OEM side but we’ve always done our best to have a relationship with dealerships too. That has served us well until this point where we can we work with around 90% of the AM100 and have exclusive OEM contracts at the same time.
Given the competitive nature of the fintech sector, how does Bumper plan to maintain its edge over competitors in 2025?
Dan Christie Through diversification of our products and, obviously, launching into the European markets but also through strengthening our relationships with our OEM retail partners. That is a huge part of what we do and can’t be underestimated versus our competitors. As an automotive-only business, our exclusive focus has given us a huge advantage over perhaps bigger businesses that have tried to ‘flirt’ with automotive for want of a better expression.
With 10 years’ worth now of data from automotive customers, that has given us the edge so that we’ve been able to win business versus much bigger businesses than ourselves. Our diversification strategy has given us an edge, because there’s no other supplier out there that is able to offer all those options. Our long term strategy has always been, to be the best at one thing as opposed to a number of different things.