Future of Captives

Article

Future of Captives

What will be the core businesses for Automotive Captives in 2030?

The OEM-related (original equipment manufacturers) auto finance companies – known as Captives – have been a true success story over the last decades, but the business model of the Captive industry is on the verge of fundamental change.

How can Captives react to all these challenges and what will be a Captive’s successful business model in 2030?

The future of Captives in 2030 will be determined by a multitude of high-impact drivers. Where developments are most uncertain from today’s point of view, scenario-based thinking can support decision-making. We have developed four extreme yet plausible scenarios to describe the future of Captives:

Scenario 1 – Owner of the mobility ecosystem
Captives are the dominant players in the finance as well as mobility service market, offering full-service lease and multi-brand fleet portfolios. They are the powerhouse of the group, contributing the majority of revenues. Captives run asset as well as service-based infrastructures efficiently at the same time.

Scenario 2 – Mobility platform orchestrator
Captives are the OEMs’ key customer relationship manager and are true digital champions. They orchestrate various mobility services. By reducing their balance sheets they were able to invest in new service-based businesses built on a flexible and scalable infrastructure.

Scenario 3 – Empty shell
Captives have moved to a substantially different business model as financial regulation tightened and new players entered the market, specializing on single parts of the traditional value chain. Captives aggregate best-in-class service providers and manage them on behalf of OEMs as well as mobility providers.

Scenario 4 – Incremental evolution
Major differences in urban mobility regulations and differing global technological adoption rates prohibited the emergence of globally dominant mobility providers. Captives have focused on incrementally optimizing their asset-based business model, for example with AI-based residual value forecasting, and also their infrastructure.

Did you find this useful?