Krungsri uses fortune-teller to boost online Car for Cash

Car for Cash enables customers to use their auto title as collateral to receive a short-term loan from the company.
Krungsri Auto launched the online channel two years ago as an informative website for its car-title loans, before adapting it into a responsive website last June by adding more features, including auto- price assessments by customers.
In the 12 months since introducing the responsive e-application form, the number of Car for Cash applications has surged by 237 per cent, with new loan bookings soaring from Bt70 million to Bt302 million, said Pairote Cheunkrut, head of Krungsri Auto.
However, he said the conversion rate from e-application forms was only 9 per cent, which presented a challenge to Krungsri Auto in terms of getting data properly completed by customers, many of whom who think the online form is complicated.
The company has therefore had to find a creative way to enable customers to fill out the online form so that they can get the funds they need and boost Krungsri Auto’s conversion rate, he added.
“From our search-engine survey, we found that people want fortune tellers to predict the future based on their car’s licence number, so we have created an interactive e-application form that uses a famous fortune-teller as the gimmick,” he explained.
Under the innovative online service, customers applying for a Car for Cash loan are required to fill in each step of the e-application form in order to get a prediction from Tossaporn Sritula – widely known as “Mor Chang”.
Krungsri Auto hopes that the number of new interactive e-application forms will as a result increase to 13,000-15,000 a month from 6,000-7,000 currently, he said.
Pairote said the company was now targeting new loan bookings of Bt450 million via the e-application route this year, up from Bt170 million last year, and that the channel would enable |overall new Car for Cash loans this year to hit the target of |Bt23 billion.
In the first five months of the year, Krungsri Auto approved lending totalling Bt170 million to customers who applied for auto-title loans via www.car4cash, showing that there is a definite move towards more people |using the digital channel, |he suggested.
“Competition in the auto-title loan sector is intense, but we hope to maintain our market share of 39 per cent to maintain leadership in the segment,” the company head said.
The Thai auto-title loan market is currently worth around Bt58 billion, with 3-per-cent growth expected this year, against expansion of 1-2 per cent last year, he added.