Car verification app launched in South Africa

The app becomes the first of its kind in the South African car market.

“The app utilises state of the art technology and links directly to our in-house and various 3rd party databases to produce up-to-date and accurate validation data for any vehicle,” said Royden Volans, commercial director at Lightstone. “By scanning a vehicle’s license disc, the report providing vehicle verification can be downloaded directly and immediately onto a smart device.”

The report generated provides details of the car’s make, model, year of registration and colour. Details of previous insurance claims on the vehicle are also provided as well as any major work that has been done on the vehicle.

Volans said that the Vehicle Verification and Information (VVi) app will prove useful to the car dealers, who are usually faced with a fraud risk when accepting vehicles from customers. The app mitigates this risk by allowing the dealers to verify the authenticity of the vehicles.

“In addition, dealers have previously also had to wait sometimes for days to receive this information, potentially leaving them massively exposed when accepting a used car or at risk of the customer simply going elsewhere,” he said.

The Master Dealer Agreement places the vehicle verification responsibility on dealers, and banks can claim the full value of the finance back if they prove the dealer did not conduct accurate checks.

South Africa has also embraced the new Consumer Protection Act (CPA) and Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) that will force car dealers to make their transactions as transparent as possible.

Volans says that VVi will enable companies to transform their regulatory requirements into strategic marketing tools.

He believes that VVi is the first of the many new developments in a suite of innovative solutions aimed at the car sales industry.