Automotive finance technology provider Solifi has joined the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council and will integrate BlackBerry IVY with the company’s open finance platform to drive innovative, high-impact finance use cases for OEMs and automotive finance providers.
Solifi becomes the first automotive finance technology provider to join the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council to accelerate their development community’s focus on creating high-impact technology use cases and solutions that leverage in-vehicle data.
BlackBerry IVY will complement Solifi’s open finance platform by providing a reliable and secure way to access a broad catalog of vehicle sensor data to enhance existing value-added services, optimize business operations, and power a new wave of innovative products and services. Access to rich, real-time data will accelerate the predicted once-in-a-generation shift to new financing models that are fundamentally changing the way consumers and businesses use and manage vehicle resources. This shift will drive increasing numbers to forego traditional ownership of vehicle assets in favor of pay-for-use or shared-ownership financing models.
As the newest member of the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council, Solifi is uniquely positioned to promote and advocate for the global automotive finance industry, which includes OEMs, banks, and independent automotive financing firms.
With many parts of the broader automotive industry eager for granular real-time and near real-time data sets to determine residual value assessments, maintenance and repair costs, for example, integration with BlackBerry IVY will enable Solifi to provide its customers with better fleet management services and more intelligent cost-forecasting.
“We are thrilled and honoured to partner with BlackBerry and the broader IVY Advisory Council members,” says David Hamilton, CEO of Solifi.
“By 2030, forecasts indicate 95% of all new vehicles sold globally will be connected. Experts anticipate this exponential increase in connectivity and data availability will represent $250bn – $400bn of incremental revenue opportunity for the automotive industry.”
He adds that now is a timely opportunity to bring forward the voice of the automotive finance industry and help deliver solutions that provide real value to OEMs, lenders, fleet managers, and consumers.
“We look forward to collaborating with BlackBerry and introducing intelligent, data-driven solutions for the next generation of retail, fleet, and wholesale automotive financing.”
Solifi delivers a global portfolio of end-to-end, integrated solutions to the automotive finance market, which are used by many of the world’s leading OEMs and financial services firms.
Solifi’s open finance platform easily integrates with third-party partners, like BlackBerry and helps secured finance lenders automate their workflows, reduce risk, launch innovative product and service offerings, and make more informed decisions about their businesses.
“It’s a great pleasure to welcome Solifi as the newest member of the BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council, a select group of companies across the transportation and mobility industries who are quite literally driving and shaping the future of what it means to get from A to B,” said Peter Virk, Vice President of IVY Product and Ecosystem, BlackBerry.
“Solifi are trusted by leading players across both the automotive and financial services value chains, and with BlackBerry IVY, together, we have the potential to turbocharge innovation and unlock new streams of revenue in an industry on the cusp of profound transformation in terms of how vehicles are valued, paid for, managed, repaired and optimized.”
BlackBerry Ivy Council
Launched in June 2021, the previously invitation-only BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council, comprised of leading companies across the transportation and mobility industries, is now continuously expanding.
The BlackBerry IVY Advisory Council’s purpose is to accelerate the BlackBerry IVY development community by focusing on the creation of high-impact technology use cases and solutions that leverage in-vehicle data.
Council members help drive the BlackBerry IVY roadmap, focusing on co-value development with a view to addressing key pain points that OEMs are looking to solve for.
Announced in December 2020 as part of a multi-year, global agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), BlackBerry IVY is a scalable, cloud-connected software platform that will allow automakers to provide a consistent and secure way to read vehicle sensor data, normalize it, and create actionable insights from that data both locally in the vehicle and in the cloud. Automakers can use this information to create responsive in-vehicle services that enhance driver and passenger experiences.
BlackBerry IVY addresses a critical data access, collection, and management problem in the automotive industry. Modern cars and trucks are built with thousands of parts from many different suppliers, with each vehicle model comprising a unique set of proprietary hardware and software components.
These components, which include an increasing variety of vehicle sensors, produce data in unique and specialized formats. The highly specific skills required to interact with this data, as well as the challenges of accessing it from within contained vehicle subsystems, limit developers’ abilities to innovate quickly and bring new solutions to market.
BlackBerry IVY will solve for these challenges by applying machine learning to that data to generate predictive insights and inferences, making it possible for automakers to offer in-vehicle experiences that are highly personalized and able to take action based on those insights.
BlackBerry IVY will support multiple vehicle operating systems and multi-cloud deployments in order to ensure compatibility across vehicle models and brands. It will build upon BlackBerry QNX’s capabilities for surfacing and normalizing data from automobiles and AWS’s broad portfolio of services, including capabilities for IoT and machine learning.
BlackBerry IVY will run inside a vehicle’s embedded systems, but will be managed and configured remotely from the cloud. As a result, automakers will gain greater visibility into vehicle data, control over who can access it, and edge computing capabilities to optimize how quickly and efficiently the data is processed.
With BlackBerry IVY’s integrated capabilities, automakers will be able to deliver new features, functionality, and performance to customers over the lifetime of their cloud-connected vehicles, as well as unlock new revenue streams and business models built on vehicle data.
For instance, BlackBerry IVY could leverage vehicle data to recognize driver behavior and hazardous conditions such as icy roads or heavy traffic and then recommend that a driver enable relevant vehicle safety features such as traction control, lane-keeping assist, or adaptive cruise control.
IVY could then provide automakers with feedback on how and when those safety features are used, allowing them to make targeted investments to improve vehicle performance.
Additionally, drivers of electric vehicles could choose to share their car’s battery information with third-party charging networks to proactively reserve a charging connector and tailor charging time according to the driver’s current location and travel plans.
BlackBerry IVY could also provide insights to parents of teenage drivers who may choose to receive customized notifications based on insights from vehicle sensors when the number of passengers in the vehicle changes, when the driver appears to be texting, distracted, or not observing speed limits, or when the vehicle occupancy level rises above the parents’ desired safety threshold.
Similarly, parents of infants could receive a reminder to engage the child safety lock when the vehicle detects a child in the rear seat.
BlackBerry IVY will enable automakers to compress the timeline to build, deploy, and monetize new in-vehicle applications and connected services across multiple vehicle brands and models.
Instead of investing in one-off solutions that conform to the unique engineering of different vehicle models (as they do today), automakers using BlackBerry IVY will be able to leverage different types of data as common building blocks for new services that could work across a range of models.
Automakers will be able to use the platform’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to share data and outputs with their software development teams, giving them the ability to innovate, while also protecting customer privacy and security by controlling whom can access vehicle and app data and at what level of detail.
In addition, BlackBerry IVY will make it easier for automakers to collaborate with a wider pool of developers to accelerate creation of new offerings that deliver improved vehicle performance, reduced costs for maintenance and repairs, and added convenience.
For instance, by analyzing real-time performance data, automakers could recognize the first signs of potentially faulty parts, deploy code to identify affected vehicles, notify impacted drivers, and perform targeted recalls.
Automakers will be able to remotely deploy and update the software from the platform’s Cloud Console (a web interface for managing BlackBerry IVY) to continuously improve the functionality of the system.
