Online pricing was always part of Miles. Now people expect it on every website
Whether they lease or finance their next car, today’s consumers start online. They configure a car, compare options and check the monthly rate long before they speak to a dealer or broker.
Pricing has been at the core of SOFICO Miles from the start, and it has had to keep changing along with the way people shop for cars. Ahead of our webinar on the SOFICO Miles Enterprise Price Calculation Service on 15 December, we sat down with Bram Wallach, Sr. Director of Product Strategy at SOFICO, to talk about how online pricing in Miles got where it is, what it couldn’t do until recently, and what comes next.
How has buying a car changed, and what does that mean for lease and finance rates?
A lot more cars are leased or financed today, so the sticker price matters less. People shop on the monthly rate. And they expect to see that rate in step one, while they’re still choosing. They don’t want to request it, wait while someone calculates it behind the scenes and get a quote by email the next day.
For a long time, that was simply how it worked. Getting a price was a second step: you asked for a proposal and waited for it to arrive. Many leasing and finance companies ran on mainframe systems, and bringing those calculations online was technically very hard. So they built separate front-office systems with their own calculation engine. That solved the speed problem and created a new one. Pricing now lived in two places, and the two didn’t always agree.
Today the first touchpoint might be an OEM configurator, a dealer’s tablet or a fleet portal. Wherever it is, the number people see first has to be the number they get later.
Hasn’t SOFICO been doing online quoting for a long time?
Yes. And back in the Leasebase days, we had a separate front-office tool as well, called WebIntegrator. So we know the separate-engine model from the inside.
With Miles we moved to an integrated front office. Miles Web has been around since about 2008, and it calculates prices live on Miles through an API. It served indirect sales through dealers and brokers, as well as user-chooser scenarios in corporate fleet, and it did that job well.
All of that ran behind a login, though. Known users, predictable volumes, and the same transactional back end that also runs the contracts. Ten or fifteen years ago, people were happy just to have an online tool. Expectations for online journeys have moved a long way since then, and a public website with unpredictable traffic is a different job altogether. That’s one of the reasons we built SOFICO Miles Enterprise.
” Ten or fifteen years ago, people were happy just to have an online tool. Expectations have moved a long way since then. “
What’s different with SOFICO Miles Enterprise?
Two things. When we started reworking our architecture, better support for online journeys was one of the main drivers. We had mobile apps in mind, and public web portals where anyone can come in without logging in. So SOFICO Miles Enterprise calculates online prices separately from the transactional system. It’s available 24/7, it scales with traffic and it responds instantly. But it uses the same content as the back end: the same vehicle catalog, the same pricing logic and the same pricing values. It isn’t a second engine you have to keep in sync.
The second difference is our move to the API layer. Quotes and contract-related actions are available through APIs, so we don’t have to own the screen they appear on. Our customers can keep their own look and feel and their own presentation layer. We can be the glass of the front office, but we don’t need to be. The pricing, however, should not come from somewhere else. We provide it from the very first price simulation to the end of the contract, and for every adjustment in between.
” We don’t need to be the glass of the front office. But the pricing should not come from somewhere else. “
Why does it matter so much that pricing comes from one place?
In our earlier webinar with Paul Bennett, we talked about consistency in pricing. It starts with the first price someone sees online. The contract that follows has to reflect exactly that price, so nobody gets a surprise at signing. And it doesn’t stop there, because you keep recalculating over the life of the contract, for amendments and even for adjustments at the end of the contract.
If your quoting engine and your contract system each calculate in their own way, someone has to reconcile the two, and sooner or later they drift apart. With one shared source of truth for pricing, there is nothing to reconcile. You set up pricing once in Miles, and your public website, your dealer tool, a partner channel and every later recalculation on the contract all use it. And when pricing changes, the change reaches every channel right away, without waiting for the next release, next month or next week.
What SOFICO Miles Enterprise adds is instant calculation at scale, which is what the online world needs. It matters most on public web portals, where traffic, and with it the calculation workload, can jump without warning.
Where does this run today, and what’s next?
The new calculation architecture is live today at dealer point of sale and on public web portals. One example is a large German OEM, where it runs behind the public car configurators. The lease rate updates live with every choice the visitor makes.
Those first integrations were done closely with each customer. We’re now productizing the way we integrate and orchestrate these calculation workloads, driven by our Price Calculation Service (PCS), across the rest of our offering: SOFICO Miles Showroom for direct-to-consumer sales, dealer point of sale, and user-chooser quoting in corporate fleet.
Further out, our roadmap moves all initial sales and budget calculations off the transactional back end, so Miles Core only comes in at the time of underwriting and contract onboarding.
Rate book calculations are also on our list to shift workloads onto the SOFICO Miles Enterprise architecture, where they get better scalability and higher throughput. The goal is price lists that update themselves whenever pricing changes, so a visitor filtering by budget range always sees the latest price.
Save your seat: “One pricing setup, the same price on every channel”
Want to see our pricing capabilities in action? On 15 December, Bram Wallach, Petar Pilipović and Perry Mace show a leasing company’s website running on Miles pricing, live. They’ll discuss how Miles’ calculation capabilities are evolving, which pricing scenarios work today and how it all fits together architecturally.
Can’t join live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.
