Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the KAR Investor Update Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. I would now hand the conference over to management today. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, and thank you for joining us today for the KAR Global Investor Update. We are grateful that you are taking time today to learn more about KAR's strategic direction and future outlook. Before Peter kicks off our discussion, I would like to remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we present today, and such risks are described in our SEC filings. In providing forward-looking statements, the company expressly disclaims any obligation to update these statements. Let me also mention that throughout this presentation, we will be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures.
Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the applicable GAAP financial measure can be found in today's presentation materials, which are available in the investor relations section of our website. Now I'd like to turn it over to KAR Global CEO, Peter Kelly. Peter?
Thank you, Eric, and good morning, everybody. I'm delighted to be here with you this morning to provide an update on KAR Global. I'm excited about the many opportunities that lie ahead for our company, and I look forward to sharing more about our strategy, our pipeline of innovation, and our path to what I believe is a bright and compelling future. In terms of today's agenda, I have some content that I'd like to share with you. I expect that to take around 45 minutes. After that, our CFO, Eric Loughmiller, will rejoin me, and we'll both take your questions. With that, let's get started. Many of you may recall we held an Analyst Day event on September 21st, 2021. Those materials are available on our website, and I don't plan to repeat those here today.
However, I do think it's important to provide an update that reflects two significant changes over the past nine months. First, it is evident that the pace of recovery of new vehicle production will be slower than we anticipated back in September. This doesn't change our strategy, but I felt it important to reflect that change in our updated assumptions and communicate those updates to our investors. More importantly, however, we've also completed the divestiture of the ADESA U.S. physical auction business. This represents a significant and transformative event at KAR and one that catalyzes a broader set of changes that position us to continue leading the digital transformation of our industry. It also establishes a clear strategic direction for our business that I believe will allow us to generate greater value for our customers and for our stockholders. Let me start by summarizing how the divestiture will transform KAR.
First, closing the transaction accelerates our digital marketplace strategy and our transition to a more asset-light digital marketplace model. Next, it simplifies our business, enabling a faster and more nimble operating model and an accelerated pipeline of innovation. It also sharpens our focus. We are no longer ambivalent about where our vehicle sells. We have a clear bias towards digital. This focus enables a more targeted investment approach in the platforms and solutions that are most strategic to our customers, namely our digital platforms. Finally, this transaction enhances our financial profile. By reducing our leverage, it creates greater flexibility around capital allocation. We also believe that in the medium and longer term, it will help us deliver higher growth profit margins, higher EBITDA margins, and accelerated rate of growth. Post-transaction at the highest level, KAR now has two principal components, and these components are interrelated and synergistic.
We have a used vehicle marketplace business, specifically a digital marketplace business, where buyers and sellers interact to sell and buy used vehicles at scale. We also have a used vehicle floor plan business that provides financing and transaction-related services to independent used car dealers. These dealers represent a very significant portion of the North American buyer and seller base. While these two components are separate, there is an important synergy between them. Floor plan financing increases buyer liquidity and customer engagement, which in turn creates a more dynamic marketplace. A dynamic marketplace delivers better outcomes for buyers and sellers alike. Additionally, there are many cross-selling and cross-marketing opportunities that allow us to further enhance customer stickiness and loyalty. Together, we believe that these two businesses provide a strong, interconnected foundation for growth.
In terms of that growth, let me start with the end in mind here and move to a preview of our growth outlook and our 2025 financial targets. I'll preface this by saying that one of my highest priorities as CEO is to provide you with tangible, realistic goals of what I believe this company can achieve. As we factor in our industry outlook and consider the many opportunities ahead, this is what I believe we can deliver between now and 2025. A 13% compound annual growth rate in revenue using 2021 last year as our base year. Adjusted EBITDA of $500 million, representing a compound annual growth rate of approximately 20% between 2021 and 2025. More than $700 million in cash generated from operations from 2022 current year through 2025.
Two quick footnotes that carry through this presentation and our materials. When we speak of revenue here today, we're generally excluding purchased vehicle revenue. Our 2021 Adjusted EBITDA baseline also excludes the investment gains realized last year. I will provide a more detailed breakdown of our financials later in the presentation, but for now, let me tell you why I believe KAR is positioned to achieve these targets. I'll start with our assets. KAR has a powerful integrated set of offerings that are leaders across our industry and differentiated from our competition. We have OPENLANE, the number one digital platform for off-lease vehicles, supporting nearly 80% of North America's off-lease inventory. We are the co-leader in the rapidly growing digital dealer-to-dealer market on a North American basis through our BacklotCars, TradeRev, and CARWAVE offerings.
We are a clear market share leader in Canadian wholesale, both digital and physical. AFC is one of the leading floor plan providers with many opportunities for growth that I'll discuss later. We also have RDN, the nation's largest SaaS platform for processing repossessed vehicles. We have a growing international footprint with a large addressable market in Europe. To make all of that happen, we have a talented leadership team and a talented employee base with deep digital expertise and domain expertise that is ready to accelerate KAR into the future. Together, I believe these assets put forth a powerful value proposition based on three things. First, opportunity. There is a large addressable market for our business, with new and expanding opportunities emerging across the automotive sector. Second, innovation. We are a company of entrepreneurs, and we remain fully committed to innovation.
As a digital business, we will be able to invest more in innovation and accelerate our development pipeline to help support our customers and to capture the opportunities ahead. Finally, growth. When you take that large market opportunity and consider the assets that KAR has today and the innovations that we are advancing, we believe we can deliver strong growth in revenue, margin improvement, profitability and cash generation. I'll cover each of those in greater detail later on this morning. I'm going to start with the opportunity because I believe that there are significant and compelling opportunities ahead for KAR Global that I'd like to share. Now, when we think about scaling our opportunity, we start with our vision, which is to build the world's greatest digital marketplace for used vehicles. This is what we aspire to accomplish. It informs our strategic decisions and our investments.
Again, we believe the pursuit of this vision creates a significant opportunity for growth. As I look ahead, there are several powerful growth drivers that will be available to us over the medium and longer term. First, we serve a used vehicle market in North America that is large and rich with opportunity. Globally, the opportunity is even larger. Additionally, digital adoption and the shift from on-premise physical auction transactions to off-premise digital transactions continues across our industry. I will share some statistics on that in a moment. The real key to capitalizing on these opportunities is our people. From our leadership to our frontline employees, our people have a deep understanding of our industry and of our customers. Our management and their respective teams bring digital expertise and experience from both in and outside of the automotive sector.
Together, they have a proven track record of driving innovation, deploying new technology, and scaling businesses from startup to market share leaders. I think our deep bench strength and our entrepreneurial culture are differentiators that will help deliver on the growth we anticipate between now and 2025. Notwithstanding these significant assets and opportunities, it is also well known that our industry has faced numerous headwinds over the past two years, which has caused our industry volumes to be well below normal levels today. I remain confident that these challenges will resolve over time, and that as they resolve, these headwinds will ultimately become tailwinds, helping to accelerate KAR's growth. Currently, these challenges do persist, and some of them may take longer to resolve than I had anticipated back in September of last year.
The primary headwind remains reduced new vehicle production owing to semiconductor and other supply chain challenges. Based on our conversations with our OEM customers, we now expect the volume recovery to be delayed by at least six months from what we originally thought back in September, and the production impacts will affect volumes of vehicles produced in 2022 and in 2023. It is also worth noting that the macroeconomic landscape has changed since last September with rising inflation and interest rates, a greater risk of recession, and potential geopolitical risks. Notwithstanding these challenges, I believe there remains a lot of opportunity ahead for our business. Let me spend a few moments breaking down the size of that opportunity. In our September meeting, I went into a lot of detail about our addressable market.
I won't repeat it all here, but at the highest level, if we look to North America, we see a used vehicle market with approximately 60 million total used vehicle transactions per year. Approximately 40 million of those are retail used vehicle transactions, and approximately 20 million of those are wholesale used vehicle transactions. The total dollar value of these transactions is estimated at over $400 billion annually. KAR predominantly serves the 20 million unit wholesale market today. That is our core market. However, we do see future opportunities where our offerings may evolve to help customers execute retail transactions in a more digital world. I will talk more about that later on.
In terms of our customers, when we consider our commercial sellers, franchise dealers, independent dealers, and other stakeholders, we see a universe of well over 100,000 marketplace participants across the U.S. and Canada, and obviously a greater number when you consider markets overseas. There's clearly still a lot of headroom for KAR to innovate, capture share, and grow. I'd also like to share some data that supports our premise that digital volumes are increasing and will continue to increase in the future. The graph on the left is based on KAR's internal data. It shows the volume of off-lease returns and the percentage of those vehicles sold on our OPENLANE platform. As you can see in 2019, a little over 50%.
In the first quarter of 2019, I should say, a little over 50% of our customers off-lease vehicles were sold digitally through our channels. Today, that percentage is well over 80%. Now, part of this increase can be attributed to the current low vehicle supply of off-lease vehicles and the high demand from dealers, and you can see the volume decrease on the graph. In speaking with many of our commercial off-lease sellers, their goal is to maintain strong digital conversion as volumes return and maximize the volume of vehicles sold in the digital channel. On the right, we've taken the North American dealer-to-dealer transaction volume from KAR and the data publicly available from our competitors as the numerator. In the denominator, we've assumed an industry estimate of approximately 10 million dealer-to-dealer transactions annually in North America.
This isn't precise math, but directionally, you can see that digital dealer-to-dealer transactions represented less than 5% of all North American dealer transactions in 2019. By early 2022, they've increased to approximately 13%. That is significant growth in a short period of time. There's a large addressable market, and that market continues to evolve towards digital. These two factors create a lot of future opportunity for KAR. Now let's break down that opportunity into the segments that drive our transaction volumes today and what may contribute to an expanded opportunity in the future. The first category I want to highlight is off-lease vehicles. We expect off-lease volumes to return to the 2 million-4 million annual transactions range.
As I mentioned earlier, this is a well-established category when it comes to digital, with the vast majority of lease returns currently selling through digital channels and specifically through OPENLANE. Our expectation is that as off-lease volumes return, digital conversion on our platform may drop somewhat from the current high level, but we believe it will remain much higher than the pre-pandemic levels. Next up is dealer-to-dealer. This is the largest category of vehicles in the wholesale used vehicle market. We estimate there are approximately 10 million transactions annually that our marketplaces can address. For many years, this category was resistant to moving online, but it has been gravitating towards digital since the advent of business models like TradeRev and BacklotCars. These businesses were able to create an effective means of inspecting and transacting vehicles without sending them to physical auctions.
I believe that this segment is still in the early stages of its digital evolution and that it will continue to grow. In fact, I believe that over time, digital off-premise transactions will likely represent the majority of all vehicles sold in this category. KAR is also well positioned here as the co-leader in North America. Within our marketplace business, most of our volume today is derived from off-lease vehicles and from dealer-to-dealer transactions, and the projections that we share with you today are primarily reflective of volumes in those two categories. However, there are also two other important categories of vehicles where KAR has potential opportunity, and those are repossessed vehicles as well as retail used vehicle transactions. These two areas do not reflect a meaningful part of our current performance, and very little is factored into the projections that we'll share today.
However, they do represent important areas of potential upside that we are actively pursuing. I'll start with the approximately 2 million vehicles repossessed each year. Historically, repossessed vehicles have sold almost exclusively in the physical channel. There are many reasons for that, logistical, regulatory, force of habit and so on. KAR already has a number of profitable assets working and operating in the repossession space, namely PAR and RDN, and these could be leveraged to help transition this category towards a digital solution in the future. I'll talk more about that in a moment. The second category of expanded opportunity is the estimated 40 million retail used vehicle transactions each year. Now, this is not our core business, and we are not launching a retail brand, but we believe there is significant opportunity for KAR as this segment continues to evolve.
Consumer preferences are shifting to faster, easier online experiences. Our customers, especially our dealers, will need digital tools, data, and insights to help them compete for those retail sales. We believe that KAR can help our dealers to do this by applying a number of our digital wholesale capabilities, and I'll provide you with a few examples of how we're doing this in a few moments. When you add all this up, there is a large market of opportunity ahead, and I believe KAR is better positioned to grow and succeed than many of our new and legacy competitors. With that opportunity as our backdrop, one of the most important messages that I want you to hear today is that this company is fully committed to innovation. Our new digital operating model will help us invest additional capital and resources into our innovation pipeline.
Our team now includes many entrepreneurs who have started and scaled their businesses and deployed innovative new technology and solutions. I believe we have the talent, the experience, and the financial flexibility necessary to accelerate innovation and extend our lead across the industry. When we talk about innovation, we do this through the eyes of our customers with the goal of solving their pain points. This is embodied in KAR's purpose statement, which is to make wholesale easy so that our customers can be more successful. At the end of the day, we believe that this is what our customers want. They want effective wholesale solutions, and they want those solutions to be easy, and they want those solutions to help improve their bottom line. This is the promise of digital, and these are the expectations that KAR is focused on delivering.
Let me highlight a few of the ways we're using innovation to advance our purpose. First, a key aspect of making wholesale easy is delivering on two key attributes, the speed of sale and the price attainment or retention. Our investments in our digital channels keep these attributes at the very top of our minds. The good news is that our performance in both areas is very strong and better than many of the current alternatives. When we look at the speed of sale, whether it's on our OPENLANE channel for off-lease vehicles or our dealer-to-dealer channel, the current time to sale is approximately one day. That's very impressive and notably faster than alternative channels. Results are similarly strong when we look at price attainment.
Over many years of analysis, our clients have generally found that not only is OPENLANE their fastest channel in terms of days to sale, but it's also their highest grossing and lowest cost sales channel. We are now seeing similar data emerging on the dealer side of our business. On BacklotCars, for example, we benchmark each sale with what we understand the performance to be in other channels. We find that our customers' results are at least equal to, and often superior to alternatives. We can further accelerate speed of sale and profitability for our customers by increasing trust in the marketplace and by de-risking digital transactions for our customers. The more we reduce risk, the greater the number of marketplace participants we can attract, and the greater the likelihood that those customers will transact at a higher rate.
KAR continues to make significant investments here, and I'll highlight just one example. A few months ago, we launched a completely redesigned vehicle inspection system for BacklotCars. This new inspection functionality integrates the best technology from across our digital platforms and deploys several new capabilities that include enhanced undercarriage imaging, state-of-the-art engine audio, and advanced OBD-II vehicle diagnostics. We also made it easier for our buyers to consume these vehicle condition reports. For example, many vehicle features are now listed either as pass or caution on the screen, and buyers also have the option of clicking in for additional information. Buyers can also opt to view a warnings-only condition report to quickly identify any major issues with the vehicle more quickly than reading through every single detail of a more lengthy condition report. These advancements were also coupled with improved protections for sellers and buyers within the BacklotCars marketplace.
For buyers, we rolled out an as-described guarantee, which provides expanded coverage that's flexible at different price points. Since launch, buyers have elected to purchase this additional protection on approximately 80% of the eligible transactions. On the sell side, sellers are now able to opt into a program where BacklotCars takes risks on vehicles once those vehicles have been consigned. Together, these enhancements deliver a better experience to customers, and for KAR, they help meaningfully increase the monetization of auction fees on BacklotCars transactions. Another way we're improving the customer experience is by consolidating our marketplace platforms. This reduces complexity, promotes the network effect of a combined seller and buyer base, and makes it easier to browse, bid, and purchase across all of our inventory. Later this year, we intend to complete the consolidation of CARWAVE and BacklotCars into a single digital venue in the United States.
This will preserve the best technology, functionality, and sale formats from both platforms and the features that our customers value the most. We are also actively working to consolidate our TradeRev and ADESA Canada digital marketplaces into a single online venue where sellers can access the entire Canadian buyer base and where buyers can search and see every vehicle that we offer from coast to coast in Canada. We expect to make substantial progress on this migration in the current year and complete it in 2023. A single online marketplace will benefit our customers and will also be a key differentiator for KAR, given our multiple sources of inventory from commercial, fleet, rental, and dealer customers. If we look at the U.S. market, for example, we are the industry leader with off-lease.
In that category, many vehicles are sold in the private label marketplaces that we offer, but vehicles that don't sell on those private labels then flow into an open marketplace where they can be purchased by any dealer. If we look at the dealer-to-dealer sales category, those vehicles today already go directly into an open marketplace. By combining these different types of inventory into a single marketplace, it will expose all of our sellers to all of our buyers and become a true competitive differentiator for KAR. As we look to the future, we will also have the opportunity to expand this advantage further by bringing in additional sources of inventory. For example, repossessions. As I mentioned, today, repossessions sell predominantly in the physical channel. Through our discussions with customers, however, there is growing interest in remarketing at least some of these vehicles digitally.
As we look to a more digital future, we believe there will be an opportunity to redirect at least some of that volume from the physical channels to a faster, more efficient digital channel that drives better outcomes for buyers and sellers alike. KAR is well-positioned to do this for several reasons. We have the capabilities to inspect a vehicle anywhere, sell it from anywhere, and deliver it anywhere. These capabilities have been developed and proven out over the past few years. Our PAR business unit already assists automotive finance companies by processing repossessed vehicles, maintaining regulatory compliance, and wholesaling those vehicles on their behalf. Our RDN digital SaaS platform connects automotive finance companies with the Recovery Agent Network, providing visibility into approximately 90% of all the vehicle re-recoveries in the United States. Essentially, repossessed vehicles and their location are known to KAR before most others.
Both of these platforms are profitable and can integrate directly into our digital marketplaces, and in many cases, their buyers and sellers are already KAR customers in other parts of our business. We can also leverage those relationships and our existing technology integrations towards a more digital future solution for repossessions. Another area where we believe our digital capabilities can help our customers succeed is in the digital retail space. This is an area that I had referenced a few minutes ago. Our industry sees continued growth in the number of consumers who prefer to interact with dealers in a more digital way. While KAR's focus remains principally in the wholesale marketplace, digital retailing channels create an opportunity to extend our relationships with dealers and other customers by helping them interact with their retail end user customers.
Let me give you two examples of how we're doing this. First, in Canada, we are live today with TradeRev's Trade-in at Home program. This program provides dealers with a digital tool set and analytics that can be easily deployed into their website and into their back-office systems. The goal is to help dealers attract digital buyers, retail buyers, accurately price their trade-ins, and seamlessly wholesale those vehicles through our TradeRev marketplace. All of this can be done and is done without the consumer ever visiting the dealership in person. Switching back to the U.S., we're in the early stages of an exciting guaranteed offer partnership with Black Book. This program provides a similar set of tools and capabilities to dealers and other business partners aimed at helping them accurately price consumer trades and quickly remarket any unwanted inventory.
We are in active discussions with a number of our customers, and they are eager to collaborate with us to further advance this program. The examples that I've shared with you thus far all relate to our marketplace business, but we are also helping dealers compete and succeed through our AFC floor plan business. It's important to point out here that while AFC provides financing solutions to dealers, they also have a broad and growing portfolio of products and services aimed at helping independent automotive dealers run their businesses more effectively, more efficiently, and more successfully. In fact, it's worth highlighting that today more than 50% of AFC revenue is derived from transaction fee or product-based revenue, not from interest on floor plan loans. The example on this slide is AFC's new LienPay program.
This allows independent used car dealers to accept trade-ins that are not fully paid off from a previous lender. When dealers purchase our LienPay product, AFC finances the new loan and handles all of the paperwork and processing involved in paying off the existing lienholder. This saves the dealer time and allows them to more effectively source inventory directly from consumers. Of course, it generates meaningful fee revenue for AFC. This is just one of many examples of how AFC is solving independent dealer pain points and making transactions easier so that their dealer customers can be more successful. In doing so, AFC is able to generate revenue that is additive to the interest revenue on floor plan loans.
Just to close out this section on innovation, I've tried to highlight just a few of the compelling initiatives that are in the early stages or still in development here at KAR. I also want you to know that this pipeline of innovation is comprehensive. We have always been leaders in innovation, and we intend to keep and extend that lead. Over the next few years, we will increase our investments in traditional R&D to develop the next generation of digital solutions for our customers, solutions that will help them be more successful and help us earn more of their business. We will fund that innovation internally with the cash generated by a leaner operating model, cost management, higher margins and profitability, which are all part of my next topic, which is growth. When it comes to growing our business, our formula is quite straightforward.
A large addressable market of opportunity, plus innovation that helps our customers to be more successful, translates into more business, more market share, and ultimately growth for KAR. Let me spend a few more minutes detailing the type of growth and performance that we believe our business can deliver through 2025. On Adjusted EBITDA, we ended 2021 at $238 million. Again, this excludes the realized investment gains from last year. As you may recall, on our last quarterly earnings call, we provided a 2022 Adjusted EBITDA target of $265 million dollars. There are no changes to our guidance. Finally, as volumes return and the automotive industry is back to firing on all cylinders, we believe that Adjusted EBITDA can grow to $500 million by 2025.
This is based on a projected compound annual growth rate in revenue of 13% that will drive an Adjusted EBITDA compound annual growth rate of approximately 20% between 2021 and 2025. As I mentioned earlier, our cash position will remain strong as we anticipate generating over $700 million in cash from operations between 2022 and 2025. I believe this is a very compelling financial model and one that is built on a strong and realistic set of assumptions and capabilities. As we talked about, there is a visible and growing shift towards digital, one that we are well-positioned to capture. This shift, combined with the divestiture of the ADESA U.S. physical auction business, gives us opportunity to streamline our operations towards a lower cost operating model.
That translates into higher growth and improved profitability on top of that growth, which ultimately generates attractive cash flows. Let's explore each of these, and I'll start by providing a little bit more insight into the breakdown of our marketplace business. To be clear, we may not report this level of detail in the future. We want to help you understand the contribution each component plays in our overall success and the math behind our 2025 expectations. Let's start with commercial off-lease business, primarily supported by OPENLANE. In 2021, those areas delivered revenue of approximately $100 million, with gross profit margins of over 90% of revenue. We expect to grow revenue by a compound annual growth rate of approximately 13% between 2021 and 2025.
In dealer-to-dealer, we're the co-leader in the fast-growing digital segment of our industry and driving towards growing our volume and share across North America. In 2021, dealer-to-dealer delivered revenue of $229 million, with gross profit margins of approximately 48% of revenue. We expect to grow revenue by a compound annual growth rate of approximately 30% between 2021 and 2025. I also want to talk about our ADESA business in Canada, a business which is also fully digital and no longer runs cars through physical auction lanes. We're the clear leader in the Canadian wholesale marketplace, and we believe we have a strong and sustainable business that will continue to be very compelling for KAR. In 2021, ADESA Canada generated revenue of $195 million, with gross profit margins of approximately 63% of revenue.
Given our current market share and the trends we see today, we expect to grow revenue by a compound annual growth rate of approximately 3% between 2021 and 2025. If I look at our services businesses, those offerings that support, empower, and enable our marketplaces and help create a more seamless experience for our customers, we believe that these will also contribute to strong growth going forward. In 2021, those service areas delivered revenue of approximately $336 million, with gross profit margins of 15% of revenue. We expect to grow revenue by a compound annual growth rate of approximately 7% between 2021 and 2025.
Finally, though I have not talked a lot about it yet today, the European automotive market is similar in scale to that of North America, and we have a host of innovative and disruptive digital solutions that will help us to continue to grow our footprint in Europe. In 2021, our international business delivered revenue of $79 million, with gross profit margins of approximately 60% of revenue. We expect to grow revenue by a compound annual growth rate of approximately 7% between 2021 and 2025.
If I look at the marketplace business as a whole, and this is how we anticipate reporting it going forward, we believe our strategy and execution can deliver a revenue compound annual growth rate of approximately 14% from 2021 to 2025, and an Adjusted EBITDA compound annual growth rate of approximately 34% from 2021 to 2025. Switching to the other primary component of our business, our AFC floorplan business, is a very stable and profitable business that I believe is capable of meaningful growth and revenue contribution between now and 2025 as well. As I mentioned in the innovation section, one of the most compelling aspects of AFC's business model, and perhaps one of the least understood, is the strong revenues and margins that AFC generates outside of traditional interest revenue.
In 2021, AFC was already generating more than half of their revenue from non-interest fees. For several reasons, we expect 2025 revenue to be even more heavily weighted towards that transaction revenue. Now, part of AFC's current strong performance can be attributed to market conditions. Higher vehicle prices generate higher interest payments, and high consumer demand with low supply has kept default risk at low levels. We believe that any increase in default risk between now and 2025 will be offset by volume increases in loan transactions, and those loans will generate both fee and interest revenue. AFC has also been active digitizing their business and becoming much more efficient through automation and centralization of back-office functions. We expect their pipeline of innovations to deliver new products and services to help drive their revenue and profitability higher into the future.
When we look at the business growth at AFC, they delivered revenue of $289 million last year. We expect a revenue compound annual growth rate of approximately 11% between 2021 and 2025, and an Adjusted EBITDA compound annual growth rate over the same period of approximately 5%. That's the growth equation for our business. As I mentioned earlier, another key part of our transformation is evolving towards a lower cost operating model. We believe that we're uniquely positioned to accomplish this post-transaction, and we have already made significant progress in 2022. As stated on our first quarter earnings call, we expect to reduce our run rate SG&A expenses by $30 million per year by the end of 2022, and we are on track to hit this goal.
This effort will extend beyond 2022, as we believe there is additional opportunity for cost management by focusing on the following areas, continuing to right size our organization for the current market and the pace of growth that we anticipate, reallocating our resources and our investments towards the highest growth initiatives, consolidating our platforms, as I described already, to reduce cost and complexity for our customers, and leveraging a global shared services model where it makes operational sense to do so. In general, while we do anticipate some expansion in costs necessary to drive the incremental growth that we are projecting, we anticipate that those costs will grow at a significantly slower pace than our rate of revenue growth.
If we're growing as we expect to grow and managing our cost structure as closely as we intend to, this will drive improved margins and profitability for KAR. Here is a summary P&L for our business using 2021 actuals and projected results for 2025. I'm not gonna walk through all of these, but I do want to highlight a few key metrics that we believe are important and compelling. One, on a consolidated basis, we expect to sustain gross profit margins as a % of revenue above 50%. We expect to reduce SG&A as a percentage of revenue from the mid-30% range in 2021 to the mid-20% range by 2025. We expect our Adjusted EBITDA margin to increase from approximately 20% of revenue in 2021 to close to 25% of revenue in 2025.
The key driver of this bottom-line improvement will be our marketplace business. We do expect growth from the floorplan business, but we expect the marketplace growth will drive the majority of our Adjusted EBITDA increase from the $238 million in 2021 to the $500 million in 2025. Again, this is all accomplished with the backdrop of very strong cash generation. We anticipate generating more than $700 million in cash from operations between 2022 and 2025. Our capital allocation priorities will be as follows: organic investment in our core businesses, investments in strategic growth, and returning capital to shareholders. Since the closing of the ADESA U.S. physical auction divestiture, we have repurchased approximately $78 million in KAR stock at approximately $15.12 per share.
Importantly, we will have even more flexibility due to the substantial reduction in debt to be serviced as a result of our recent divestiture. In the near to medium term, we expect this business to operate with less than one turn of net debt. As I mentioned earlier in today's presentation, my goal today was to provide you with a clear and realistic outlook of how this company can perform between now and 2025. As I look to the future, there's a large opportunity for KAR, but also some challenges that we need to consider when forecasting our growth. To summarize the interplay of those opportunities and challenges, I believe that there are three key requirements to us delivering the targets that I set forth.
First, we need to see some degree of recovery in commercial volumes, and we expect to see that. Even though there are fewer leases being written in 2022 than in prior years, a more normalized market environment will bridge the current disconnect between residual values and wholesale values and will tend to drive volumes back into our off-lease funnel. In the dealer-to-dealer segment, we need to grow our volumes. We believe we have the best technology and platforms available, but we have to execute and continue capturing share as the industry continues to shift towards digital. I believe that we will do that. Finally, we need to manage our costs. Our new, more nimble digital operating model enables us to do this and will give us more flexibility to deploy capital towards the highest growth opportunities that are available to us.
In closing, my key takeaways for today are as follows: KAR is a leader in digital marketplaces for wholesale used cars. We have always been at the front edge of this evolution, and we intend to extend our lead in the ongoing digital transformation of our industry. In doing that, there is a large and expanding addressable market with meaningful opportunities for growth. I believe that we're well-positioned and uniquely positioned versus our competition to capture those opportunities. We are executing on a clear and deliberate strategy to accelerate growth and innovation across our company and extend our lead across this industry. We will do this by managing our costs against our market conditions, achieving a smaller, more nimble operating model, and shifting resources and investing more heavily in R&D around the areas of technology and innovation that we believe will drive our future growth.
We believe our digital strategy and focus will enable us to grow earnings at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 20%. We are profitable and cash flow positive today. We intend to increase those profits and cash flows in the years to come. If you add all of this together, we have a clear focus on digital marketplaces and on digital innovation, and the opportunity for our company is large. We intend to increase the capital committed to true R&D activities to help our customers be more successful and ultimately to expand our addressable market and our share within those markets. This will drive meaningful growth in our business and improve profitability, which will allow us to fund these investments internally while delivering growth and meaningful stockholder value.
Thank you very much for your time, for dialing in, and for listening to this presentation this morning. With that, Eric Loughmiller will now rejoin me for the question-and-answer portion of this call. Operator, please open the lines for questions. Thank you.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone, and to withdraw your question, just press the pound key. Once again, that's star one for questions, on hold for questions. Our first question will come from the line of Ryan Brinkman from JP Morgan. You may begin.
Hi. Great. Thanks for taking my question. You know, you've sometimes referred to yourselves as a natural owner or a more natural owner of the off-lease app-based dealer-to-dealer business. Can you specify what advantages it is that you bring to the off-lease dealer-to-dealer market as a result of your owning your other operations? For example, I heard you say, you know, increasingly allowing all of your buyers to have access to all of your sellers. Maybe you can elaborate on that effort, but I'm also curious how important, you know, the sales force, the customer relationships or AFC might be. While I realize these may all be advantages relative to ACV, at the same time, it would seem that these other resources or versions of them would also be available to Manheim, should they wish to ramp their efforts in this area.
I'm curious, you know, if the 2025 EBITDA target assumes you will roughly maintain your share in the off-lease dealer-to-dealer space or gain share or dominate the market with network effects or even lose a little share in a growing market. You know, how are you feeling generally about your competitive position in the space and what is embedded in the targets? Thank you.
Well, thank you, Ryan. First of all, I do feel good about our competitive position. First of all, if we look at the offerings that we have in the dealer-to-dealer space, so, you know, in Canada, TradeRev, BacklotCars, obviously integrating with CARWAVE in the U.S. I feel those platforms are strong, with a strong offering to both sellers and buyers and delivering high levels of performance to the customer. I feel good about the offerings, you know, as they stand, and obviously, we continue to invest and innovate within that. As I mentioned earlier in this call, I do think we've got some unique differentiators, as you mentioned, on inventory and the ability to bring, you know, more types of vehicles into that marketplace.
You know, there is a long-term vision of consolidating towards a single open marketplace in Canada, as I've mentioned, but also in the U.S., because I think that creates a network effect and creates benefits for sellers and buyers. You layer in our position with off-lease vehicles, where it's very, very strong, and you layer in the opportunities that we have with repossessions. Again, that's much more nascent today, but I think we've got a unique market position, based on the assets I talked about. While I don't wanna comment in detail, but I think some of the things we're doing with our guaranteed offer program, that I hope to speak to later in the year, will also be evidence of ways that those also contribute strategically towards the dealer-to-dealer offering as well.
I think we have some unique advantages there, and I think just an exclusive focus on digital. You know, it's very clarifying in terms of our strategy, and leads to a much more sort of focused investment approach that I think will be telling over the long, long term. Assets like AFC, transportation, et cetera, are also meaningful for sure, and I think there's, you know, synergies there as well. In terms of our 2025 targets, you know, we expressed it here more as a revenue target. Clearly, we expect to grow volume. You know, in terms of our share, I would like to think we can at least maintain share, Ryan.
You know, it certainly is not a market dominating vision that I've articulated here today, but it is a volume growth scenario. You know, I'd say behind the numbers, the volumes inherent in our 2025 projection in the dealer-to-dealer segment would be a little over a million units sold on the digital channel. I think that's a very realistic volume goal versus where we are today.
Okay, thanks. That's really helpful. Just finally for me, you know, as we think about the expected almost doubling of EBITDA from 2022 through 2025, just a couple questions around that, including like, firstly, you know, how much of the expected growth in earnings relates to cyclical recovery in your core end markets, such as impacts, the OPENLANE business, for example, versus how much might instead relate to, you know, expansion into some of this new white space that we just talked about, like the off-lease app-based dealer-to-dealer business? Secondly, what is assumed about, you know, those core end markets in 2025? Have they essentially fully recovered, and that is a normal representative year? Are they, you know, over, you know, rebounding and 2025 is, you know, an extremely strong year?
You know, should we think about that as sort of the base, you know, through the cycle kind of earnings power of the company as it exists in 2025? How should we roughly think about that?
Yeah, good questions, Ryan. If I could just add one more comment on your last question. I guess what I'd say, you know, again, I am focused on at least, you know, maintaining share. To the extent the market were to grow faster, I think our goal would be to maintain share. But we've kind of tagged our volume expectations versus the rate at which we, you know, currently expect that market to grow, let's say. To go to your second question, you know, the increase from current year towards 2025, how much of that is, you know, cyclical versus share growth? Clearly, there's an element of cyclical. Like, we have some business units that are, I would say, materially underperforming their historical because of the substantial volume challenges that exist right now, okay? You know, OPENLANE volumes are down.
Not only are volumes down, but revenue per unit is substantially down there because the transactions that are happening are happening, you know, at that grounding dealer level. The first dealer for whom the car is returned typically is buying the car, you know, 90%+ of the time. We've got a volume and ARPU challenge there, and then other businesses that are tied to off-lease, like transportation, inspection, also very challenged. If I were to sort of rough order of magnitude it, I'd say approximately 50% of the increase is probably driven by our industry progressing back towards a more normal level, and 50% of the increase is probably driven by, you know, volume growth to, you know, share gains, expansion of the digital addressable market and so forth, okay, customer gains. That's an approximate, but I'd say that's reasonably close.
In terms of what scenario have we anticipated for 2025, we have absolutely not assumed a market that is all the way back to normal. Because, you know, if nothing else, Ryan, we've got to acknowledge that in the current year, the leases that are being written this year, and that's a lower volume of leases because of reduced retail sales and lower lease penetration, that'll be the off-lease maturity profile in 2025. You know, inherent in our projections, you know, there'll be a somewhat reduced pool of off-lease vehicles. What we do expect, Ryan, is that as those vehicles come off lease, we won't have this significant equity disparity that we have today, where consumers or grounding dealers are buying out all these leases.
Because these leases are being written at higher, you know, MSRPs, higher retail transaction values. We expect that to normalize and ultimately, that'll drive, you know, some vehicles flowing deeper into the funnel and the revenue per unit returning closer to normal.
Peter, for clarity, Ryan, for clarity, the white space opportunities are not a component of the growth in EBITDA. Specifically Trade-in at Home.
There's a small cost related to it with a small contribution, and the same would be applied to the repo activity.
Yeah.
on the digital marketplace.
They're not a meaningful part of our projections at all.
Right.
Yeah. Good point.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thank you, Ryan.
Our next question will come through line of John Murphy from Bank of America. Your line is open.
Good morning, guys. Just a first question around one channel you left out of the discussion here, and it's the return of rental companies selling into the market. I think we all understand that they're buyers in the secondary market right now, but ultimately, as things normalize, they'll be sellers. I mean, how do you think about how they fit into this, you know, and could they be incremental to what you're talking about here? Are they sort of subsumed, sort of under the, you know, under your volume expectations already?
Yeah, John, you know, there are opportunities in rental, and it's a good observation. We were just trying to keep it fairly concise and keep the presentation to the sort of the most meaningful sort of volume movers. You know, we do sell rental cars digitally and have done so for many years. We typically include those within the OPENLANE volume. I just know from having met with some rental car companies, you know, since our divesture, there is significant opportunities for us to do business together. I see that as an area of opportunity. Right now, as you know, rental car companies aren't depleting a lot of vehicles. In fact, they're some of our biggest buyers of used vehicles.
You know, based on my discussions with them, they believe they will remain long-term buyers in the used vehicle market as well. I see significant opportunities with our rental company partners, both on the sell side and on the buy side of our marketplace, but also in a lot of the ancillary services that obviously we offer here at KAR as well. I'm excited about that opportunity, but I didn't go deep on it in my presentation.
Okay. That's helpful. Just a second question, as you think about, you know, the porting of business from the physical to the virtual world, and we all understand it's moving reasonably quickly. You know, since you've sold your 56 sites to Carvana, I mean, has that hastened this move for any, you know, transactions or sellers and buyers in the market? What kinda, you know, retention do you think you're having there above and beyond, you know, the transactions that were already moving digital? I mean, how much of that are you pulling across, is really basically the question. I would imagine it's a pretty material portion of that business.
Yeah. I don't know if I'd say we've hastened or that it hastens that transition, although it probably has, John, on the margin. There's just other complicating factors in our industry right now, you know, on, you know, retail new vehicle sales were down in May and, you know, the off-lease
Yeah.
Volume continues to be under pressure, so it's hard to sort of separate one from the other. What I would say, you know, I've had a chance to meet with many of our customers over the last two months, and, you know, certainly when I talk to our large captive finance off-lease sellers, they've gotten accustomed to selling now 80%+ of their off-lease vehicles digitally, and frankly, sending very, very few to physical auction. I don't hear them telling me that they're looking forward to the day when they'll be sending large volumes back to physical. In fact, they say, for the most part, "We'd like to maintain high digital conversion in the future as volumes return. How can you help me do that?" They're very keen for us to sort of have that discussion. I see that opportunity.
Then, you know, talking to a number of dealer groups as well, you know, I think they see a more digital future for their used vehicle wholesale business. Obviously, we're not the only player in town. We have to compete for that business, and we expect to do so, but I'm confident of our ability to compete effectively against the competition there as well.
Okay. Lastly, Peter, you mentioned something on the sell side as well as the buy side of the equation of, you know, offering sort of assurances or insurance essentially to the seller once they put the vehicle into your channel that they're no longer responsible for, you know, repping the vehicle necessarily at a certain level, but also doing that on the buyer side. Basically, I mean, one of the key functions of your auction historically has been sort of the middleman to make it right by the buyer and the seller, kind of no matter what's going on with the vehicle.
It sounds like, you know, in this virtual world, you're finding a way to charge even more directly for those assurances and clearance and making things right. Can you just kind of expand upon that a little bit and what kind of revenue opportunity that is potentially from the seller and the buyer and kinda how we should think about profitability there? 'Cause that sounds like a burgeoning, you know, new sort of offset plus opportunity that might be very high margin and very high return.
Yeah. I think for sure it's an interesting area, John. I don't have all the specific detail here in front of me, but you know, on the buy side, you know, if I talk about the changes we made with BacklotCars, what we introduced was you know, essentially a purchase guarantee product that the buyer you know, makes a decision on at the point of purchase. You know, if they choose that product, then we will you know, stand behind you know, the inspection as it stands. The adoption on that is significantly high, as I mentioned.
Similarly on the sell side, we offer opportunities for the seller that if, you know, at a slightly higher price point, there will be no returned vehicles. You know, any arbitration will be handled by us, and that's proving quite attractive to sellers as well. You know, in addition to the sort of revenue opportunity. By the way, I think, you know, these programs have contributed towards increasing our revenue on digital dealer transactions to, I believe just above $600 per car sold at the present moment. That's materially up from, say, where it was a year ago. That revenue does not include any financing, any floor plan financing revenue. That revenue would include the auction fees, any guaranteed products, and transportation.
It's having a meaningful impact, but it also, I think, improves customers, customer satisfaction because arbitrations, you know, are just a dissatisfier. If you can eliminate that from the customer's consideration set, you generally end up with a happier customer too.
Okay. Any rough swag on margins on that kind of revenue at this point? I mean, I'd imagine it's very high or is it too early to tell because you have to build the
Um-
performance track record?
Yeah, I don't have.
It's typically very high margin, especially on the vehicle transaction size of the BacklotCars because the arbitrations aren't that expensive. The question is, what's your arbitration rate under the program, John? You know, if you can drive that arbitration rate down into the mid-single digits, it's very profitable.
Yeah. Another way of looking at it, John, is, you know, in the past, before we had this product, we were essentially taking on board some of those arbitration costs anyway, just in terms of keeping the customer happy.
Yeah
Without monetizing it specifically. What we did was we expanded the set of arbitrations that we would sort of own and take on the risk for, but then we put a price in to handle those as well as the ones we were already handling. It's, you know, that's kind of the way the economics of the program have worked for us. It's been a significant contributor to the overall profitability of the business, yes.
Okay. I'll follow up on more details. Thank you so much, guys.
Thank you, John.
Thank you. Our next question will come from the line of Craig Kennison from Baird. You may begin.
Hey, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Peter, I think you said that repos have a bias towards on-premise channels. Curious, why is that, and what are the barriers to pivoting the bulk of those cars to digital channels?
Yeah, good question, Craig. Again, repos have been very sticky in the physical channel, at least up to this point. I attribute it to, you know, a number of things. One is sort of logistical and regulatory. You know, in many states, the seller has to wait a period of time before the vehicle can actually be sold, and that typically varies by state, okay? The simple fact that you have to allow a certain number of days to elapse before you can sell the vehicle creates a need for storage and reduces sort of the value proposition of a fast, you know, digital channel. Again, that differs by state and sometimes differs by the type of repo as well. Obviously, force of habit and just this is the way it's always been done.
There's just an inertia in any industry towards change. I'd say those are the principal factors. I don't know that I predict a point where the majority of these repos shift to a digital channel. I think we're looking at scenarios where we can say, "What segments, what states, what types of vehicles might be more easily migrated?" We're having some interesting discussions with customers around that. I also think part of the motivation, Craig, is, you know, as the buyer base in our industry overall shifts to a more digital buyer base, then the sellers of these vehicles wanna make sure they have their vehicles in front of the broadest possible network of buyers. I think the power of the digital marketplaces has improved materially.
Again, the sellers are much more interested than, say, they were, you know, five or 10 years ago in terms of exploring how they could make this happen.
Thanks. One more from me, Peter. How do you perceive the threat or and/or opportunity really from these online valuation tools in which dealers are sourcing cars directly from consumers basically based on a VIN, and in some cases bypassing these wholesale channels? I'm guessing it's a threat to some volume, but also maybe an opportunity for you as well.
You know, I think it's both, Craig. I think it's a good point. I like to focus more on the opportunity side. Again, you know, if I just look at, say, our presentation this morning, the Trade-in at Home product, I'd say, is exactly that. It's really empowering the dealer. Our core customer is the dealer. We're empowering the dealer to interact with that end retail customer who would prefer to interact digitally. We're enabling the dealer to, you know, have that consumer do a very simple inspection of the vehicle at their home and sell that vehicle in the TradeRev marketplace. By the way, that tool has been used or is being used by over 1,000 dealers and has led to over 5,000 incremental vehicles sold on TradeRev since launch.
I believe it's also led to at least an equal number, another 5,000 vehicles or probably more, that the dealer has been able to source for their own inventory. We're creating value for that dealer customer. You know, our guaranteed offer product in the United States will, I think, have similar, you know, sort of attributes. I see it as, you know, double-edged, but I think, ultimately, if we can enable dealers with our data and with the power of our wholesale channel to operate more effectively on the trade-in side of their business, that creates opportunity and volume for us ultimately. That's what we're doing.
Thank you.
Thank you, Craig.
Our next question will come from the line of Daniel Imbro from Stephens. Your line is open. Your line is open.
Sorry, I was on mute. Thanks so much for all the color today, guys, and good morning. Peter, I want to follow up on one of John's earlier questions. It sounds like, you know, over the six months, internal projections have been pushed out for how long the volume recovery takes. I'm just curious, you know, can you provide specifics on maybe what you're hearing from the OEMs? Like, when are you assuming production improves? When are you assuming we start to see some of these volumes improve? Just so we can kind of measure the industry against that as we think about your outlook.
Yeah, good question. You know, in the last when we spoke last September, I believe what I indicated that we expected to see production volumes improving in the second half of this year and returning towards normal in the first half of 2023. My expectation now is that we are at least six months further out than that. I don't expect a material improvement in production before the end of this year. That doesn't mean I expect no improvement in production. I think there may be small incremental improvement in production before the end of this year. I think it's gonna be 2023 before we see any meaningful increase in vehicle production. I don't think total new vehicle production will be normal in 2023.
It'll be at least 2024 until it's back at that level.
Okay. Thanks. That's helpful just to level set. Then, Eric, one on the financials. You know, on the OpEx outlook, you talked about the $30 million of cost takeout this year. If we take that out, you know, it looks like the guide to 2025 implies core OpEx growth of somewhere around 3.5% per year. It just feels a little bit low, I guess, given the inflationary backdrop. I'm curious, you know, what gives you confidence that expenses can stay that controlled at a 3.5% CAGR for the next four years? Or are there further cost takeouts you can quantify or that you're baking into the numbers? Or any other color you can give on the expense outlook as to what underpins that 3.5% CAGR? Thanks.
Yeah. Let me start with some details, and I think Peter may wanna add some color on this as well. The $30 million references actually short-term actions that are really geared towards rightsizing our organization. That's the annual run rate of actions we're taking, let's say now through the end of the year. The opportunity has other elements to it that would be executed beyond this year. Actually, maybe they'll start this year, but the impact would be seen beyond this year. There is more. We don't view that increase that you're implying in there as inflation. It's actually the netting of continued focus on maintaining a, shall we say, a lower cost structure through the business, offset by increases that come from the recovery and the need to support the transaction through some additional SG&A.
Peter, do you have anything you wanna add on that?
Yeah. I guess, yeah, I say just in terms of the straight math, I'm focused on getting to a certain level of run rate by the end of this year.
Mm-hmm.
I think, Daniel, when I view it through that lens, the growth rate and cost is a little larger than 3.5% we talked about because this year it's almost like two different, you know, the first half will be different than the second half, right?
Yes.
We've got that kind of a dynamic. I think it's a little higher than what you say, but nonetheless, it's substantially lower than the growth rate from revenue. I do think it's achievable. You know, as Eric said, the near-term actions are around rightsizing the organization. I think longer term, focusing our investments, you know, and allocating our resources towards the higher growth initiatives at this company, that's a clear area of focus. Consolidating platforms, which reduces complexity for customers, but also maturity reduces our costs. There's significant opportunity for that, and that's evident to you all based on, you know, past calls and past questions. That's part of the agenda. Then, you know, we're also looking at global shared services for certain operations where those make sense. There's an agenda around that as well.
You know, we're gonna be very focused on costs. We're gonna be very disciplined around costs. I, you know, I think we can manage to the projections that we've talked about here. Obviously, some of that is dependent on the broader macroeconomy, not having inflation at 8% for the next three years, but getting inflation under control, certainly before 2025, which obviously we hope will happen.
The last component I didn't focus on for you, Daniel, remember, the digital marketplaces are less labor dependent than the physical businesses. There is less, call it inflationary pressure on wages relative to the transactions when you're operating using technology.
Great. Peter, Eric, really helpful. Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate the questions.
Once again, that's star one for questions, star one. Our next question on the conference line is from Bret Jordan from Jefferies. Your line is open.
Hey. Good morning, guys.
Hey, Bret.
In the prepared remarks, I think you talked about sort of upping some of the vehicle inspection technology and going to under car and some of the engine audio products. I guess, how do you see your condition report differentiated from peers now? Is there anything meaningful that separates you from others?
You know, Well, I believe we are strongly positioned vis-à-vis our condition report. Now, clearly, the condition report is important. It's very important to the buyers, but also the sellers to understand the vehicle that they're buying and selling. Obviously, we continue to talk to our customers and seek out what are the areas for improvement, because we always wanna get better. That led to some of the investments we talked about. Obviously, you know, our competitors continue to innovate too. I would say we're all sort of similarly positioned in terms of the condition report. We're all looking at the technologies that might exist. There's a lot of discussions around artificial intelligence. Can that improve the process?
I will say though, the other thing we're focused on, Bret, is making it efficient to actually do the inspections. I think in that regard, I believe we're very well positioned. You know, in the U.S., our BacklotCars inspection, you know, a key constituency there, as well as the inspectors themselves. How can we recalibrate the technology to enable them to be more productive? We solicit that input. In Canada on TradeRev, a lot of the inspections are actually done by dealers themselves. Making the technology very intuitive and easy for the customer to use, and I think we're well differentiated in that regard too. I mentioned the Trade-in at Home product. You know, that's an inspection that's actually done by a retail consumer.
Now that has to be really simple. It can't be at the level of detail that you would ask a dealer to do. But it's very interesting to me that, you know, we can have a consumer do a very simple inspection from their driveway, and that can result in 5,000 vehicles sold in our digital marketplace. That's pretty exciting too. We look at all of this. The inspection and condition reports in general will remain one of the key areas of investment and focus for KAR simply because it's so critical to our customers.
Okay, quick follow-up. In your slide, you noted the consolidation of CARWAVE and Backlot in 2022. Could you give us an idea where you are in the process there? Is that largely complete? I guess what you've learned in the process.
Well, it's not yet complete. I set a goal, I think on a prior call at the end of Q3, Bret, so we're still working towards that timeline. I think some of the things I talked about in terms of the policies and the buyer and seller protection, the guarantees, that was what we called wave one of the integration. It was sort of harmonizing from a product and policy standpoint, both offerings. Now we're focused on the sort of technology integration of how do we integrate a timed auction, CARWAVE style timed auction into BacklotCars. We've made, I believe, good progress with the technology. We're trialing it, you know, load testing it, as well. Obviously, all of that is based on, you know, feedback from customers.
What are the features that they liked, wanted to see retained long term? I feel good about that, and we're on track to complete it this year for sure.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Bret.
Thank you. Now I'm not showing any further questions in the queue. I'll turn the call over back to management for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Victor. Listen, thank you, everybody for your attendance here today and for your questions. I guess I'll wrap up by saying I'm excited about the opportunity ahead. Notwithstanding the challenges of the current market, this company has significant opportunities ahead. Again, as I said earlier, we have a clear focus on digital marketplaces and on innovation, and we have a significant addressable market available to us. We intend to continue to invest in R&D to help our customers be more successful, ultimately expanding the addressable market that's available for digital transactions and increasing our volume and share within those markets. I believe that will drive meaningful volume growth in our business and improve profitability, allowing us to continue to fund these investments with internally generated capital, while also returning capital to shareholders and increasing stockholder value overall.
It's an exciting opportunity for our company and our team. I really appreciate your support, and thank you again for your time this morning.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.