SAN DIEGO — Wells Fargo plans to automate auto loan decisioning through to funding, while Chase Auto will focus on creating a digital journey that allows customers to buy a car from anywhere … even their couch.

“Next year, we are in this journey to automate decisioning all the way through funding,” Puneet Chandra, head of product and digital innovation at $1.94 trillion Wells Fargo, said Tuesday during a panel discussion at the Auto Finance Innovation Summit. “We definitely want to make sure that we are providing all the services and tools to customers, across omni channel, not just online sources.”

Automating the entire car-buying journey is a goal at Chase Auto, starting with artificial intelligence-based targeted offers that appear when the customer is ready to make a purchase through the signing of the contract, said Brandon Tapp, head of dealer services at the lender. Chase Auto is owned by $3.95 trillion JPMorgan Chase.

One caveat for Wells Fargo and Chase Auto is that automation should never impinge on the dealer’s role, both Chandra and Tapp agreed. Easing dealers’ concerns has been a culture challenge through the automation process, they said.

“What a dealer always fears from a financial institution or lender is that … automation means we’re going to keep that customer,” Tapp said. “Our goal at Chase is to have a customer go to chase.com, sitting on the couch eating Cheetos. We want them to be able to find the car they want, get approval on that car, be delivered to the [customer relationship management] system for the dealership, so that dealership knows they’ve got a fully packaged deal.”

The two executives also offered a glimpse into how development works within the banking giants.

Chandra said the Wells auto development team is a “few hundred people.” The unit leverages the enterprise development team for projects that benefit the entire bank, such as integration to the online platform.

Meanwhile, Chase Auto has 200 to 300 employees on its auto finance team out of approximately 12,000 dedicated IT workers across the bank, not counting product employees, Tapp said, adding that the lender looks to adapt platforms it may already have in use elsewhere.

“When we look at something from an automation standpoint, the first thing we do is we look across the firm,” he said. “Does our mortgage group or does our credit card group have a platform, or anything that we can adapt in auto?”

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