Yes Car Credit

...to accompany her to a Yes Car Credit depot in the South East. For whatever reason she had been declined a car loan by her local bank, nothing immediately sprang to mind but perhaps a combination of having gone self-employed, and a change of home address in the space of 6 months made for a difficult case.

The service and highly questionable sales procedure we were subjected to at Yes Car Credit was so laughable that we left the appointment ...
...personal experience of dealing with Yes Car Credit I would take this opportunity to serve a note of cautionary warning to other’s maybe considering a visit to their local depot, look objectively at the service if you feel it has value for you but, as with any financial transaction be on your guard for the highly focused and not entirely 100% visible corralling procedure we encountered which, for me, was well outside acceptable limits.

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Last week I was asked by a friend to accompany her to a Yes Car Credit depot in the South East. For whatever reason she had been declined a car loan by her local bank, nothing immediately sprang to mind but perhaps a combination of having gone self-employed, and a change of home address in the space of 6 months made for a difficult case.

The service and highly questionable sales procedure we were subjected to at Yes Car Credit was so laughable that we left the appointment early making no commitment.

Relating purely to my personal experience of dealing with Yes Car Credit I would take this opportunity to serve a note of cautionary warning to other’s maybe considering a visit to their local depot, look objectively at the service if you feel it has value for you but, as with any financial transaction be on your guard for the highly focused and not entirely 100% visible corralling procedure we encountered which, for me, was well outside acceptable limits.

I am a Salesman myself and have been for the last 15 years in the software business. If you’re selling a product and service of real value and quality and you do it at all times endeavouring to apply the utmost integrity then you have nothing to fear and nothing to hide in being completely open, honest and straight forward with prospective customers. The real value comes not just in the initial sale but the long term relationship and trust you instil in one another through a totally ethical approach to business – I found all these qualities seriously wanting at Yes Car Credit.

So just to revisit the facts, Yes Car Credit is a Loan Company, not a car company. The fact that you have to make an appointment to see them is because you are making an appointment to arrange finance with them, the car is a secondary matter. If you think you are going to turn up to a car showroom where all the vehicles have a price on the windscreen and you can wander and browse freely think again, you will be involved in a process to get a loan from them first and foremost and secondly a highly prescribed process of purchasing one of their cars.

Secondly Yes Car Credit specialise purely in dealing with people with a lower credit rating who are likely to have been refused credit elsewhere. On the basis that there is supposedly an addition risk in lending to people of a lower credit rating there also supposedly comes justification in the argument of charging much higher than base rate levels of interest for your loan. They advertise 19.9% on their literature so go in with your eyes open – if you don’t like 19.9% don’t make an appointment.

This is all fine, nothing incorrect with Yes Car Credit’s stance or business model so far.

The problems for me started straight away when we arrived in the yard and were aware that we weren’t allowed to browse the vehicles in advance. A cursory glance at those cars nearest the fence with their new coatings of tyre black and ciggy burns in the seats told me that these were likely to be exclusively higher mileage trade-ins and bulk fleet auction buys. My concerns were compounded when we met the Salesman and my friend parted with a plethora of personal documents, company details, £300 cash deposit, contact telephone numbers of three people that knew her etc etc. All this was put in a plastic wallet and taken away, out of the room, out of view, by the Salesman. I really would have preferred (an exercised her legal right) to have kept all these things in sight but OK checks have to be done, my friend didn’t mind, and if Admin is up a floor we’ll go along with it.

The Salesman came back 15 minutes later saying that we had been approved and could have credit of £239 per month, absolutely no mention of what sized loan this represented or over what period of time – just simply “you can have up to £239 per month,” a totally meaningless number without the other pieces of information and part of a Sales process designed to draw you in to Yes Car Credit’s maximum advantage.

After a bit more meaningless banter I really stressed that, having been approved we’d like to see what cars were on offer. On the way out to the hard-stand the Salesman told us it would be best to remove the tax disc from the car we had arrived in and wanted to trade in as part-exchange. On asking why he said that it would be to our advantage as his boss might well look over the car whilst we were looking for our new one and might have an eye to reclaiming the unused portion of tax for YCC – he was doing us a favour in that we should take the tax disc so we could claim back the unused portion – the Sales spiel was becoming just a joke, more part of a physcological ploy to instil in you the idea that you are parting with your old car….remember you’re here for a loan and a new car.

After wandering around a number of cars we asked for a closer look at an X Reg Ford Mondeo which looked in fair shape. I naturally had a number of questions, “what was the price, how many months would it be over, was it a 2000 X plate or a 2001, what was the mileage etc”. For just about every question I asked the Salesman had to disappear back to the office, returning each time with notes scribbled on bits of paper which he kept close to his chest. I finally managed to ascertain that the price of the car was £6800 and on turning the key in the ignition that the mileage was 82.5k.

I mentioned that at £6,800 this was the most massively overpriced Ford Mondeo for that age and mileage that I had ever seen (I have had a number of Mondeo’s myself) to which he replied that it was the retail price. This was absolute rubbish, the actual retail value of this particular vehicle is £4,995 nearly two grand less and you’d never even expect to pay that.

One of the things that also alarmed and concerned me about the whole process was that in all this time the value of our trade-in vehicle had never at any time been mentioned and when I tried to introduce it into the conversation on two or three occasions the point was stone-walled each time. The guy just kept saying “well what do you think it’s worth” - I can seriously see scenario’s occurring where, caught up in the blinding sales process and paperwork unwitting punters might actually forget they drove a car in and leave a Yes Car Credit yard with no recognition at all for their trade-in vehicle. In a court of law the earlier removing of the tax disc oneself would be seen as an admission that one was preparing to and knowingly parting with the vehicle.

We’d seen enough and decided to leave, the final laugh being the pitch from the Salesman that he’d have to get his Manager down to explain why we were leaving and to corroborate his story - it was just a joke. When my friend noticed on retrieval of her documents that she didn’t have her log book or MOT certificate another lady came down with the documents and a last bid sales pitch mentioning that she’d managed to come up a slightly different finance deal.

Just to be clear in financial circles that, as the value and profit of financial products and services to wealthy people and individuals of high net worth declines there is currently a race on to supply Loan services to those millions of people around the world with poor credit ratings as it has been shown that on the whole they are still good bets and the majority do not in fact default. Because in the UK we have more liberal credit laws than elsewhere in continental Europe the UK is currently viewed as a lucrative and fertile market by many offshore Venture Capital backed funds, foreign and domestic finance companies keen to capitalise on the massive potential of lending to the “underclasses”
If you have a less than perfect credit rating then your business is going to become far more highly sought after both now and in the future.

I do understand the prospective appeal of a company like Yes Car Credit, I have had a slip in my credit rating in the past and I do know what it’s like to be on the B list but if you absolutely have to use Yes Car Credit then just be duly diligent, ask the questions you want to ask, do the sums, work it out, and don’t be afraid to walk away, – they’ll likely still be there tomorrow. If it looks and sounds too good to be true it probably is.

So to summarise had we decided to proceed with Yes Card Credit we would have been buying a car that had long seen it’s best years past and whose price was massively inflated above and beyond the retail price to start with. We would have been paying interest at around 3- 4 x the base lending rate and dealing with a place that frankly just looked and felt like the whole opersation was a stitch-up.

My personal opinion is that Yes Car Credit’s sales procedure treats prospective customers with total contempt. Your credit rating is poor and the extent to which they seem prepared to milk that situation is well above acceptable limits. The convoluted and clandestine manner of the sales process gives them ample opportunity to exploit any number of avenues to along the way in making the process confusing, misleading and over-bearing for people who might otherwise be vulnerable.

Cheers
G.

 

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