Next up, we're really excited to have OPENLANE here with us today. OPENLANE's one of North America's leading digital automotive wholesale marketplace operators and a category leader in dealer floorplan financing. It's a compelling asset-light business that consistently generates good cash flows, maintains robust capital return strategy through share purchases, and executes strong growth investments to capture secular market share gains. Really pleased to have Peter Kelly, OPENLANE's Chief Executive Officer; and Brad Herring, Chief Financial Officer, here with us today. I guess first, just sort of jump into it, but you know, we're almost through the first quarter here. I think you just hosted an Investor Day. How are you thinking about the overall environment?
I guess, you know, the off-lease volume environment gets talked a lot about with you guys, relative to the growth you had thought coming into the year. What are you seeing so far that gives you confidence in the growth trajectory and, how is that, you know, sort of shaping activity on the platform?
Yeah. Great. Thanks, Alex. Delighted to be here first of all, and appreciate you all showing up, so thank you for that. Listen, we're excited about the growth set up for our company in 2026 and 2027 and beyond. We'll get into that here this morning, I'm sure. Your question focused largely into the commercial off-lease space, so let me start there. We anticipate 2026 to be a growth year, driven by the fact that lease maturities or lease originations, I should say, bottomed out in 2022.
Mm.
Started to increase in 2023. Automotive leases, for the most part, average around 36 months duration. Kinda take lease originations, add three years, that's lease maturities. That's a driver of our growth curve. We're expecting, you know, good growth in lease maturities this year. In our last earnings call, we spoke about how we thought we saw an inflection in December of last year, and we expect to see commercial volume growth in Q1. That's still our position. We fully expect that. There's a couple of other factors that add to that, frankly, that are a little unique. One is we added one brand, OEM brand customer launched in January as well.
Mm-hmm.
there's like, if you like, a step function in our sort of core supply-
Yeah.
Customer migration to our platform. That's gonna be additive to Q1 as well. That went live as planned. I mentioned that on our last earnings call as well. While lease maturities are increasing, and that's very positive for us, if you do go and look at the Investor Day materials, you'll see there's a second driver of off-lease volume growth as well, which is consumer payoffs are declining. Just speak on that for 30 seconds. Pre-COVID, consumer payoffs represent around 30% of maturities.
Mm.
We then get the opportunity to sell the remaining 70%. Post-COVID, used values appreciated a lot. That created equity in the lease maturities that previously had not existed, so consumer payoffs increased from that 30% to, like, 70%, 80%, 90%. That meant our volume went from 70% down to as little as 10%. We had a massive contraction. That is slowly unwinding. Consumer payoffs today are around, I would say, 65%-70%, and slowly or generally declining, let's just say. There's a second driver of supply growth into our marketplace as we look out over the next 2026-2027 and beyond as well.
Yep. I guess just to double-click on that, can you talk us through sort of the cadence of the off-lease volumes? So is it sort of the tail end of 2026 we really start to see that and it builds into the outer years? Or how should we think about that?
I think if you look at maturities alone, the maturity curve, the lowest quarter where leases sort of bottomed out was Q1 of 2023.
Mm-hmm.
We're exactly three years on from that.
Mm.
I think in Q2, they were essentially flat year-over-year, and in the back half of 2023, they were increasing.
Yeah.
Year-over-year. You know, sort of -5%, 0%, +10%, +15%, some sort of something like that on a year-over-year basis as you take the four quarters. If you're just looking at maturities, you'd do that sort of function.
Yeah.
You'd put three years on top of that.
Mm-hmm.
The consumer payoff kind of pulls it ahead.
Yeah.
That's one of the reasons we expected growth in Q1, is because not only, it's not just a function of maturity, it's also a function of payoffs.
Gotcha.
We're seeing that kick in in a positive way for us.
Given the, you know, consumer lease equity is, you know, sort of hovering around the lows, what percentage of the off-lease volumes are now flowing to your open sale channel versus independent dealers? How is this, you know, mix shift impacting ARPU dynamics?
Yeah. You know, we went into quite a bit of detail on that in the Investor Day.
Yeah. I
Do you wanna speak to that?
I'll cover that. If you go back and look at our Investor Day materials, which we posted, I think it does a really good job of outlining the different economics of the different categories on those lease returns. 'Cause there's really four key categories. We get paid for consumer payoffs. We get paid for transactions at a grounding dealer. We get paid for a transaction at a non-grounding dealer. Then we get paid for a transaction that gets sold in our open marketplace. What we've provided in those materials is kind of the relative ARPUs and the relative yields we're gonna get off of those different dynamics as it flows through into that waterfall. You know, we're not disclosing the percentages, but we are disclosing going forward some yield information in aggregate.
It'll capture as those blended yields move from those transactions pushing deeper down into that stack. We're gonna be very, you know, very vocal on what's happening with the yields in that commercial space. We'll talk about that on a quarterly basis.
Perfect. I just wanted to ask, how are the EV off-lease volumes performing relative to the ICE vehicles in terms of conversion rates and revenue per unit, particularly given the equity challenges?
Yeah. I guess first of all, I'd say we're pleased with how they're performing, at least in our channel. To size it for the audience here, EVs this year represent about 15% of off-lease maturities.
Mm.
Okay? There's a higher than average leasing percentage, lease origination percentage on EVs. Also you talked about equity. The EVs that are maturing are heavily negative equity, right? You can kinda look today in off-lease maturities. You've got an average off-lease equity of X, but it's kinda split into ICE vehicles that are generally still positive equity and EVs that are heavily negative equity. The consumer buyout percentage, payoff percentage on EVs is very low, like 10%, 15%. Most of those EVs are getting returned, right? They're entering our system. What we're finding is our sellers are very mindful of the fact that, yeah, these EVs are in a residual loss situation, but they're not getting more valuable unless this war maybe drives up gas, maybe that adds a little bit.
They're focused on, "I need to convert those cars quickly." They're not becoming more valuable over time, so they're working, I would say, with us to make sure they convert. Our conversion rates on EVs are, I would say, broadly comparable.
Mm.
To ICE. We're selling a very similar percentage, but we're selling them a little bit different place in the waterfall. They're not selling at that grounding dealer. They're not selling at the consumer payoff. They're selling a little deeper.
Yep.
Which is actually great for us. Again, Brad's the Investor Day materials will show you the relative ARPU, so you could from that infer we're actually generating a slightly higher ARPU off the EV.
Yeah.
Again, my conversations with commercial sellers, they again recognize they've got these EVs in their portfolio for at least the next two and a half, three years, and they see OPENLANE as a great channel to help them convert those quickly.
Yep. Maybe for those that are maybe more unfamiliar with the story, can you just walk us through that waterfall and the different sort of ARPUs sort of attached? I think that may be helpful for people, just given you made that comment.
When you think about the commercial waterfall, it all starts, let's start with lease returns, right? That's the primary category we're talking. We're not talking about rentals. We're not talking about, you know, repos, some of the other ones. Let's talk about lease returns. When a consumer sends that lease return back, their lease comes up in three years, they show up at that three-year mark, they go back to the dealership, and the first question that the consumer will make is, "Do I wanna buy it or not?" based on the equity we just talked about. That's step one. That's kind of our lowest yield channel, kind of pushing some paperwork, that consummates that transaction between our commercial customer and the consumer.
The second step of that is now the commercial customer can set the same price and say, "Now does the grounding dealer wanna buy it?" Whatever dealership that consumer returned that car into, the grounding dealer now has the opportunity to take that car. That's another kind of relatively lower yield transaction because it really doesn't even leave the building. It just stays right there. The next transaction, should the grounding dealer not want to pick up that car, it goes to a non-grounding dealer. What that means is if a person returns a Toyota lease, well now if the grounding dealer, Toyota dealer does not want that car, now all Toyota dealers across the country will have access to that car through our white label auction system.
They're gonna open that car up to a number of franchise dealers still in the same family, but now they have the opportunity. That's a higher ARPU transaction, higher yield transaction, but it also has some attachment to it. For example, it would have the attachment of transport, because in a lot of cases, these dealerships now might outsource to us to transport that vehicle from wherever it was returned to a franchise dealer that may be two, four, 600 mi away. That's a higher yield transaction now when you start getting into the non-franchised dealer. The final transaction for us then would go into the open marketplace. If no Toyota dealers want to purchase that car, now it's gonna go into our open network. Now, all the independent dealers we have will have eyes on that car.
That's the last channel that would flow through for us, and that's our highest yield channel. That is not only our highest yield channel for buy fees and for sell fees, but it also is gonna have a higher attach rate because these are mostly independent dealers that leverage more highly the use of transport capabilities that we'll provide. That's our highest yield transaction. It's all laid out in the Investor Day. We kind of put on the left-hand side of a chart.
Yep.
You know, what those relative yields look like.
Really helpful. Maybe just lastly, can you quantify the pilot program expansions with commercial customers moving to online conversion? What's the target penetration rate and timeline for broader rollout?
Yeah, I guess what I'd say there is, you know, more thematically without going into specific numbers, but what is the objective? We see a future where our commercial sellers have more supply, right? They're focused on time. They're focused on reducing their remarketing costs. They're focused on maximizing their outcome in terms of price achieved for the vehicle. We believe we can help them with all of those things. So we've got various, I'll say, pilot programs with a number of sellers to achieve those types of outcomes. I'd say generally they're going well. We've just actually at the beginning of this month, beginning of March, expanded one with one seller to two brands. They're essentially they were doing a once a week off-lease auction.
Mm-hmm.
They were kind of putting an extra open sale step on the waterfall. Like the process Brad just outlined, they were doing that, but they'd say, "Well, I want $25,000 for this car. I'm offered here for $25,000, here for $25,000, here for $25,000." We're saying, "If you don't get $25,000, let the marketplace do its work. See what the marketplace bids the car to." Maybe it's $24,200, but maybe that's a better price than putting it on a truck, take it to an auction, waiting four weeks.
Yeah.
You know. They were doing that once a week, having good outcomes. They've now moved to twice a week. We're looking to roll that out to other brands. It's things like that. They're all, I'd say, incremental, but they're geared to driving strong conversion rate, higher sell-through, particularly in that Absolute Sale channel.
Yeah. That's.
Switching to the dealer-to-dealer side. In the U.S., you guys had a really strong acceleration to 20%+ growth in the fourth quarter.
Yeah.
You know, what's enabling that level of acceleration, and is that sustainable throughout, you know?
Yeah.
Couple more quarters or?
Yeah. Well, we were very pleased with the growth rate, and we've seen acceleration in the dealer-to-dealer category, particularly in the United States, which is obviously the biggest sort of opportunity market for us. I guess to give some context on that, you know, we think our dealer-to-dealer offering is very, very strong. We think it delivers tremendous outcomes for the customers, sellers and buyers. Average days to sell is about a day. Our customers are getting, particularly our sellers, are getting great outcomes in terms of price achieved. I think that's fundamentally what drives the growth. Sellers are saying, "I'm getting tremendous results here. I need to do more business here." You know, "I wanna get more of my dealership. I got 20 dealer groups, or 20 dealerships in my group. Five of them are using OPENLANE.
They all need to be using OPENLANE." It's those types of things that are driving the growth. Listen, we've put a lot of investment into the platform. The technology's really good. The inspections are really good. We've built tools that help with price discovery and price realization. We talk about on my earnings call our Absolute Sale feature, which has become very popular. I also think the commercial volume story drives the dealer story because if you think, you know, we have these OEM brands, you know, who've got more off-lease supply coming, that's gonna bring more franchise dealers. Franchise dealers love to buy those off-lease cars. Franchise dealers are, for the most part, the supply side of the dealer-to-dealer marketplace. Right?
They're coming to our site to buy off lease, but they're also, when they're there, seeing, "I can sell my wholesale units here, and it's easy, and it's the same relationship, and it's a company I do business with." You know, that's driving that there too. We've been very pleased. Obviously, we wanna sustain the highest possible growth rate in D2D. We still think we're relatively small market share. In our Investor Day materials, we calculated that digital, which is us and a few digital competitors, represents around 22% of the dealer TAM, you know, on the dealer side of the business, so there's a lot of growth opportunity there. You know, as I see it, we're the fastest-growing player in that category today, you know.
Yeah. On that penetration gain story, I think in your deck, you talk about how 2025 had greater penetration gains than 2024. Can you unpack, like, what drove those accelerated penetration gains then? Also, I'm curious, just in the U.S. versus Canada, is online still gaining share in Canada even though it's been a tougher market for wholesale?
Yeah. Online is gaining share in Canada and I feel good about the trends we're seeing there. To go to the U.S., what's driving it, I think a number of things. First of all, we went through a significant brand consolidation, you know, and rebranding of the platform and consolidation of different tech marketplaces into one. You know, prior to the end of 2023, our commercial off-lease cars were on one marketplace, and our dealer cars were on a different branded marketplace, totally separate. Well, at the end of 2023, which is just over two years ago, we put those together under one brand, OPENLANE. I think fundamentally that rebranding and the consolidation of those marketplaces creates this, you know, scale and network effect, a benefit to us, but also to our customers, right?
Couple then the investments in tech, better inspections, launched Absolute Sale, we launched One App. We have a fairly good cadence of innovation and tech being built into this marketplace to drive liquidity, drive supply, drive better outcomes for our customers. Go-to-market investments. We put more boots on the ground, more people. You know, it's still a very relationship business. Dealers, you know, are relationship-oriented people, so I often say we're a digital marketplace in a relationship business. You know, more boots on the ground, a stronger major dealer accounts team. All those things have played into to help drive this growth. I mean, I'll keep going another one.
On the demand side of the D2D market, and Brad talked about our finance business, AFC, these independent dealers are the demand side of the dealer-to-dealer marketplace. Well, we've got 15,000 of them, you know, on our AFC platform, but only 35% of them were registered to buy on OPENLANE. We've been actively working with the 65 that weren't registered, getting them registered, training them, showing them how to use it. That's now up into the mid-50s.
Mid-50s, yeah.
We're driving that adoption. There's a whole bunch of, you know, tactics and go-to-market activities that are contributing to all this growth. Yeah.
When you look in the U.S. specifically, one of your other competitors that's really online-focused, online only, they reported single-digit% growth, and you're growing 20%+. Are there any other competitive moats where even if you just focus purely online, that you've really leaned into that have enabled those types of share gains?
I think long term, you know, in a network effect marketplace business, the biggest moat is your buyer and seller audience and the network, you know, the network effect of your marketplace, right? The fact that when a new seller comes and puts a vehicle in the marketplace, he'll get a great outcome on day one, you know. We're very focused on that. Again, in our Investor Day, our dealer, both seller and buy-side dealer counts are up over 30% over the last two years. That stat is in there. We try to keep those in balance. I think, again, our unique advantage is the fact that we have these off-lease relationships with 70% of the OEM retail brands represented.
That brings 70% of the franchise dealers who become natural customers of ours, and it's a shorter step to get them from there to be a full participant in our open sale than if you're just walking in cold, right? We've got that natural advantage. You flip over to the independent side, we've got the finance business, we've got great technology, and our customers are having great outcomes. Again, the number and the adoption, in my view, is driven more than anything else by the fact that our customers put a car here on OPENLANE, they put a car into a competitor's channel, whether it's physical or digital, and they get a better outcome here. Next week they put two cars here. It's those types of effects that drive the growth.
Just get Brad involved here. Can we double-click on the kind of go-to-market investments that you've mentioned in 2025? Why are they so successful? Looking forward to this year, do we expect a similar cadence or?
Right.
Are you in more of kind of a harvest phase?
Right. In the last couple of years, 2024 then again in 2025, we did put some additional go-to-market. It's primarily related. We talk about buyer and seller, you know, footprints. The way you go- to- market invest for each of those is quite different. You know, for example, when you go after, you know, more franchise dealers and more upmarket dealers, you tend to put feet on the street. You're gonna go have people, you know, deployed in those specific geographies. When we looked at our footprint across the nation, we found that there's some footprints we do really well at, right? We're really good in certain geographies. There were some other geographies we felt like we had some opportunities. That's where those feet on the street investments were made.
Specifically was in those geographies where we were targeting some of the, you know, franchise type dealers, upmarket dealers, buyer groups or dealer groups, et cetera. When you go into trying to create buyer networks, they're a little bit different investments. You know, those are more kind of phone-based agents that are doing outreach because there's a lot of independent dealers out there, right? To put feet on the street to touch every one of those could be challenging. So it's a little bit more of a hybrid model of having some feet on the street, but also a lot of kind of centralized phone activity. So those investments we started making, we did a wave in 2024. We did another wave kind of later into 2025.
There's typically about a six-month lag, three- to six-month lag before those benefits really start to kick in. You know, we've kind of had internal debates about, you know, repeat in 2026, but we're gonna wait and see. You know, let's see how these investments play out. We are starting to see some really good results out of the investments we made in 2025. I think the 2024 investments manifested themselves in 2025 results. We're certainly seeing some of those 2025 investments now manifest themselves in 2026 results. We're gonna let that play out a little bit. You know, it's certainly a thread we're willing to pull on. You know, as long as we're getting the returns and getting the responses we're getting from these investments, we'll continue to make them.
There's still, like Peter mentioned, you know, 75% of these transactions are still physical, right? That's a lot of runway. I would be more than willing to throw some more go-to-market investments to drive that shift forward.
Can you double-click? Earlier you mentioned the Absolute Sale feature that you guys added, pricing discovery tools that you added in 2025. Can you talk about why those helped so much? Are there any similar types of incremental features in 2026? Not to go too much into technology yet, 'cause I know Alex wants to talk about that as well, but anything on that pricing discovery type side?
Yeah. Well, I can. There are investments for sure. We've got, you know, we always have a pipeline or roadmap of tech investments. That's gonna be part and parcel of what we do at OPENLANE. Absolute Sale was really designed that a seller, they can put a car in the marketplace, and once the bidding has attained a certain level where they feel like, "Okay, I'm willing to sell it for this price or higher," they can kinda just hit an Absolute Sale button, and that then classifies the vehicle as Absolute Sale, which we find creates another. It's like putting oxygen, another layer of oxygen on the fire, right? Now the buyers. 'Cause there's buyers on there, "I wanna, I wanna just look at cars I'm gonna sell today," you know?
Now it's flagged as an Absolute Sale, and we find there's another sort of an average $800 bid up from the moment they hit that buy button to what the ultimate sale price of the car turns out to be. That's become very popular. We've launched updated OPENLANE Market Price Guidance in our marketplace app at the beginning of this year. You know, our transaction database is robust enough that now we can show pretty much for any vehicle that we've got a, "Hey, we've got a series of very similar vehicles that have sold over the last 30 days, and here's what those transactions look like." That's an effort to also, you know, close the gap between the seller's expectation and the buyer.
You know, like, maybe the seller thinks, "I want $12,000." The bidding gets you up to $11,200. Well, if they click on the OPENLANE Market Price Guide, they can see the last five transactions of that year, make, model with similar mileage and say, "Well, maybe $11,200 is the right price, so put it in Absolute Sale." You know, we're tracking all of those, the adoption of those features. We're tracking how they impact conversion. Conversion's a core KPI for the marketplace 'cause it's good for sellers, it's good for buyers, and it's good for our economics too, you know? Beyond that, I don't wanna speak too much about stuff that's yet to come, but there'll be a robust pipeline of stuff, I can assure you.
Can you provide an update on major dealer group wallet share gains and the pipeline for multi-store program expansions in 2026?
Yeah. Major dealer groups are a big category. Obviously, there's the public six dealer groups, but there's obviously, big private dealer groups as well. The category of major dealers, we look at the top 150, you know, franchise dealer groups by retail volume. You know, that's who we classify as major dealers. We've kind of got a subcategory of the top 40 as well, you know, the really big ones. We've got, one of the investments was a more sophisticated major dealer team, you know. Go out and make sure we're out talking to all of those 150. Make sure they know exactly, you know, if they've got Hyundai and Honda and GM and Ford in their portfolio, which they all do, right, then they're using our systems already.
Well, maybe we should have a national agreement so all your dealers can have the same, you know, most favored nation pricing or whatever, right? We're trying to put sort of umbrella agreements ahead with the corporate entity that gives us the calling card to call on everyone, every store in their group, right? Here's what I'll say. We don't disclose the specifics, but our growth in major dealers has outpaced our growth overall. The 20% we talked about D2D growth in Q4, our major dealer category would have been somewhat better than that.
Perfect.
Let me jump in on AI for a second.
Mm-hmm.
You've got a high-tech business in a lot of ways. If we just look out two, three, five years in AI, I mean, nobody knows where it'll be, where we'll be, but how could this impact your business? It feels like you're on the good side of that change.
Yeah. That we feel we're on the good side of that change. We talked about that again also on our Investor Day. I think fundamentally, you know, we're leaning into AI in ways that benefit our customers.
Right.
Make the marketplace more liquid. I talked about investments in the inspection. We have three AI investments within the inspection, which weren't there two years ago. One is every photo we take, AI looks at it and tries to spot damage. As the inspector's taking photos of the car, AI is saying, "I think I see a chip. I think I see a, you know, wheel rash," whatever, and the inspector gets a prompt, "Did you miss something here?" He can accept it or he can say, "No, that's just a bit of dirt." You know, it's kind of human, AI, human.
Right.
When the buyer sees those photos, they can turn on that AI layer, and he'll draw a little circle or a little squiggle around what the damage is. It kind of concentrates their focus. That's one. We take a 30-second audio clip of the engine while it's running. We've got an AI listening to that, comparing it to this is an F-150, let's say. Here's the last 20 F-150s we listened to. Here's this one.
How the coax sticks to his sound something.
Yeah. Something sounds weird in this little five-second snippet, and we'll just highlight that. Listen to that. Could be an engine knock. The third one is we do the onboard diagnostic port. We read out all those codes. Well, it's a bunch of gobbledygook of codes, and dealers can understand it, but we make it simple for them. We just have AI say, "Okay, these are the four codes to be focused on in this car. The rest of them you can kind of forget about. And these codes mean this." So there's all that type of stuff. There's AI and pricing guidance. I talked about what we brought out there. I think fundamentally it's more of an enabler. You know, we're leveraging our software development for sure, like everybody's doing that now. We're writing code faster with smaller teams.
There's opportunity on the, you know, I'll say customer support, transactional processing.
Right.
Operational side. I also think we have a high value customer, a repeat customer. I don't think our automotive dealers want to speak to chatbots yet. You know, they like to speak to a real live human, you know. Maybe if, you know, things like, "Where's my car?" Or, "When's the car being delivered?
Make it.
Maybe we put a chatbot in there. We haven't done that yet, but we're, you know, we're looking at those opportunities. Yeah.
That was good. Thank you.
Yeah.
Perfect. We'll shift to technology, but I'll first do a scan of the room, see if we have any questions out there for the OPENLANE team. Perfect. Well, just jumping to technology. At your Investor Day, you outlined some new product innovations that you've referred to as Horizons.
Mm-hmm.
I think Horizon One includes your Absolute Sale feature and a new sort of AI arbitration feature. Can you sort of describe this Horizon framework and what are the biggest pieces of the Horizons specifically for 2026 and then versus sort of multi-year Horizons?
Yeah. Yeah. The framework on the Horizons would be, you know, Horizon One would be, you know, 'Hey, we have this business and it works this way, and the technology enables these types of activities, but we're also getting customer feedback saying, 'Hey, it'd be great if you could do that, and great if your system could do this.' Salespeople are giving us the same feedback.' I'd say Horizon One would generally be incremental feature adds that are broadly aligned with the current business model, but just make it a little bit easier, faster, whatever. Most of our innovation falls into that category, making the condition reports better, you know, so on and so forth. Horizon Two would be a little bit more substantial than that.
Like, okay, we're still in the automotive dealership world, we're still in the used car world, but maybe it's a little bit more of an adjacency than some of the just incremental feature developments. We highlighted two examples of that. One I've spoken here already, which was the updated OPENLANE Market Pricing guidance. Kind of a more an all new sort of interface around, you know, historical transactions and also predictive pricing. We offer, in our OPENLANE price guide, we give you, here's the last, you know, 60 days of transactions, whatever, but here's also predicted pricing on this car over the next 90 days based on what we see the market doing, the seasonality, whatever, you know. The other Horizon Two one we did was in Canada. We've launched, I'll say, a fairly rudimentary inventory management tool.
Inventory management software is software that dealers use. Typically, it's a subscription product, and it sort of advises them, you know, "What should I stock into my used car portfolio?" You know, "What car should I wholesale? What car should I retail? How should I price them?
Yeah.
in the retail market? How should I buy them in the wholesale market? We've got an inventory management tool. We call it My Lot. It's been deployed in Canada. It's really targeted more to the independent dealer at this point in time, but we're pleased with adoption. It's been pretty strong in the first two months. We don't have an immediate plan to bring that to the U.S. We'll see. We're gonna iterate through it a few times in Canada. Horizon Three would be something that's more of a significant departure from our core business, and we're not focused there. You know, that'd be like a different vertical or, you know, something more radically different. I'd say we're keeping an eye. You know, you asked about AI.
Yeah.
We're keeping an eye out. Are there disruptive threats out there that we should be responding to? We'd look at that in a Horizon Three lens, but I don't see that yet. Yeah.
Very helpful. Your One App in the U.S. is facilitating crossover enrollment from private label to open marketplace. How has that initiative been performing conceptually, and how should we think about its scalability across additional products and with geographies over time?
It's performing very well. I mean, again, the idea was, you know, going back to that 70% of franchise dealers who are sort of natural customers, you know, going in, starting the conversation there, "Hey, you've got a Hyundai franchise, so, you know, do you use Hyundai Direct?" "Yeah, I love Hyundai Direct." "Well, that's us." You know? "And by the way, we love the fact you use Hyundai Direct, but we notice you don't use OPENLANE. It's the same technology, the same company, it's the same process. There's other sellers on there. There's cars that could be great for your store. Let us show you how to use that," right, "as a buyer, and let us show you how to use that as a seller. And by the way, all of this is available in One App.
You can log on to OPENLANE, the OPENLANE app or pull up the Marketplace app and click into Hyundai Direct." Right? "You don't need to have five different icons on your phone. You can launch it all from OPENLANE." That's kinda. It's been effective. You know, I talked about the 30%+ growth in franchise dealers, you know, so it's been a contributor to that for sure.
Perfect. The ERP consolidation, I think, is underway through mid- to late 2027. How will this enhance data consistency, and what operational efficiency should investors expect out of this?
Well, great question. We mentioned that on a call. We have embarked on some ERP consolidation. Just through the course of acquisitions over a number of years, we've ended up, you know, as is pretty common with firms that have gone through those acquiring phases with, you know, a handful of ERPs. We do have some internal inefficiencies now, basically to your point of trying to consistently look at information. We've embarked on this path. It'll be a two-year roadmap. We've already begun, so we've already signed contracts. We're already, you know, we have third parties helping us, so this is not an aspirational thing. This is an in-flight thing. We've got a pretty program phased piece of work.
We're able to get the information we need. It's just kinda clunkier than I would like for it to be. So I think what's really gonna manifest itself is in the efficiencies we'll create over time. I think that's probably a year out before we start to be able to monetize any of that just because of the time it takes. Our first phases are focused on our core activities here in the U.S., our core corporate functionality. We'll then expand that out to some of the other areas and some of the other geographies. Efficiencies is really the main reason we did it. We've been able to kind of hold it together through a lot of our own internal processes, but we can do that much better.
Perfect.
Brad, at your Investor Day, you gave some additional guidance on marketplace versus finance EBITDA growth, I think. Can you just unpack, you know, what's new for investors on that, and then.
Yeah.
Some of the key variables that could get you to the upper or lower end of those guidance ranges for the two segments?
Yeah, right. If you look at our EBITDA growth between 2024 and 2025, it was split largely equally between the marketplace and AFC. Marketplace had a lot of strong growth. AFC did a really good job of managing credit, and it was a pretty steep decline in losses in 2025, which generated a lot of EBITDA for us last year. When you go into 2026, it's a little different dynamic. You know, what we laid out at Investor Day was the EBITDA growth when we look at 2025 growing into 2026 from an EBITDA perspective, we see that highly concentrated in the marketplace for a lot of the reasons we talked about. Dealers doing really well. Commercial has a really good tailwind coming from recoveries.
When you look at the growth for next year is largely concentrated there. The reason AFC we've highlighted is gonna be kind of in a relatively flat environment. There's three things happening in AFC different in 2026 than happened in 2025. We'll continue to see portfolio growth. The portfolio will grow, you know, low- to mid-single digits year-over-year, which is a tailwind, which will help out AFC. Going the other direction, rate cuts tend to push a little bit of pressure on the net yields 'cause of timing. For AFC, you're gonna see a little bit of a compression there. We do see some normalization back to more normal loan loss rates, right? 2025 was really low, really low.
Prudently, we've expected that number to kind of return to something more like a normal rate. We talked about 1.5%-2%. We've hovered last year in the low end of that range. We think it'll normalize probably more in the middle of that range. When you combine all that together, you end up with an EBITDA growth that's really strong in the marketplace, relatively flat in AFC. We've tried to set investors up to expect that from a business segment perspective. You know, what could drive differences in that on the marketplace? You know, growth, right? Depends on how our marketplace grows. We get acceleration, whether it's dealer, whether it's commercial, you know, that certainly could improve those results.
You know, and on the AFC side, if losses stay down, which we'll have to see how time plays out, and the rate cut environment, which changes about every 46 hours, we'll see what the rate environment does. Either changes in both of those two environments could change the anticipated AFC results as well.
You're giving a couple new disclosures on a quarterly basis that are very relevant for investors, Gross Merchandise Value, and then the yield data that you discussed earlier.
Right.
Can you just talk about the framework that investors should consider when it comes to, you know, GMV growth and improving your yield?
The reason, kind of the rationale for some of the changes we made was we recognized that going into 2026, we're gonna have a pretty sizable shift in our mix between dealer and commercial. We spent a lot of time for the last 12 months talking to investors, and there was a lot of discussions around, "How do I model that mix shift?" We took that away, and Bill and I sat down and came up with a framework that says, "We're gonna proactively start providing that information separately, so you're not guessing on mix." Right?
We can look at dealer and the commercial customer categories independently, and we can grow and work through yields and work through unit economics for each one of those independently, rather than try to do that in aggregate and guess what those mix dynamics would look like. That was the real rationale for why we made the changes we did. When you think about those independently now, you can think about what do we expect out of dealer GMV and what do we expect out of commercial GMV independently? That was really the framework. Trying to guess on mix is really hard. It's really hard. What we found was, from our perspective, it's a little easier to spoon feed some of that rather than kind of in hindsight try to keep everybody corrected.
What we're gonna do going forward on a quarterly basis, and you guys might have seen our Investor Day, we gave a sample slide of what we're gonna provide. We're gonna give these calibration points, and the reason for those calibration points is to keep everybody largely in line with what we're seeing from a perspective of what's happening on the dealer side and what's happening with the commercial side independently. We think it's gonna be valuable. We got a lot of positive feedback. I recognize for those of you who have built financial models, you kind of have to rewrite some of them, and I'm gonna say I apologize for it, but you're gonna get a better answer, and we're gonna help you guys with that, with the information we're gonna provide kind of on an ongoing basis.
I think net-net, we're all gonna be in a better place.
Quickly before we finish up, can you discuss your capital allocation priorities for 2026, whether it be organic growth or shareholder returns or-
Right. We laid that out in our Investor Day too. We put a slide in the back. We're always gonna fund our organic growth. We talked about some of the go-to-market investments. Our CapEx is a relatively stable number in the $60-ish million number. Funding organic growth will always take top priority. Those aren't gonna be really large numbers for us, just from where we are in our evolution. The next two programs for us, we talk about share buyback programs. We mentioned in our Investor Day that, you know, those began in Q1. We're gonna continue to work on share buyback programs, both open and closed windows. We'll have programs set aside for both of those. We also talked about some debt pay down.
You know, we did a term loan for $550 million last October timeframe to buy out a big portion of those preferred shares. That loan, we'll start to look at paying that down probably toward the end of this year, early next year. You know, you gotta let these loans sit in the market for a minute, you know, to kind of season before you can really start aggressively paying them down. That's on our horizon, but that's probably not till late 2026, maybe early 2027 timeframe.
Perfect. Well, I think that is all the time we have. I want to thank both Peter and Brad for an excellent conversation, and thank you all for joining.
Yep.
Thanks.
No problem.
Thanks.
Mike. See ya. Thank you.