Blog

Jul 28

How to Get Your Finance Company to Lower Your Reserve Rate

When you’re scaling direct-to-consumer sales in the Vehicle Service Contract (VSC) or home warranty space, cash flow is king. You launch a $100,000 campaign. You pay your mail house and lead vendor on June 1. The mail hits mailboxes on June 10. Responses trickle in through early July. You close sales—but then wait 45 days […]

Jul 24

Why Blended Cancellation Curves Are Misleading

If you’re relying on cancellation curves from your payment plan provider—like PayLink, Mepco, or Walco—you’re only seeing part of the story. Those blended curves are useful for tracking total portfolio performance. But they won’t tell you why cancellations are happening. Because they don’t show you the differences that matter. The only way to do that? […]

Jul 22

Why Vintage Analysis Matters in Understanding Cancellations

Two curves, representing different vintages, generated by the Dark Sky Data Experience Curve.

If you’re only looking at your overall cancellation rate, you’re missing the real story. Cancellation behavior isn’t static. It shifts over time—and across different groups of contracts. That’s why you need to break it down by vintage. “A vintage is a group of contracts that started in the same period—typically a month, quarter, or. It’s […]

Jul 18

How the Wrong Earnings Curve Almost Cost an F&I Administrator Millions When Selling the Company

When preparing a company for sale, financial optics matter. For F&I administrators, few metrics carry more weight with buyers than loss ratios—and those ratios are only as accurate as the earnings curve behind them. F&I earnings curve optimization must happen before a company goes up for sale. Here’s a real-world example of how defaulting to […]

Jul 17

VSC Administrators: See the Cancellation Problem Before It Hits Your Loss Ratio

If you’re administering Vehicle Service Contracts, VSC cancellations aren’t just noise—they’re a direct hit to profitability. Refund exposure. Margin compression. Loss ratio volatility. Whether contracts are sold direct-to-consumer or through dealerships, VSC cancellations are a real and rising cost. And yet, most administrators aren’t actively tracking how, when, and where these VSC cancellations are happening. […]

Jun 18

Marketers Can Take Control of VSC Cancellations with an Experience Curve

If you’re selling Vehicle Service Contracts (VSCs) directly to consumers, you’re operating in a high-cancel environment. Many marketers see 40–80% of contracts cancel, and flat cancels—those within 30 days—are especially painful. They erase margin, trigger chargebacks, and undermine performance metrics. But not all VSC cancellations are created equal. Contracts that cancel later are far more […]

Dec 5

Case Study: Streamlining Cancellation and Claim Frequency and Severity Curve Construction

The Challenge Our client, an investment bank, often constructs cancellation and claims frequency and severity curves for their clients’ financial products. These curves are critical for predicting future cancellations, claim timing, and severity. However, the process is labor-intensive, requiring significant time and manual effort to build each curve from raw data. Updates are even more […]

Dec 4

Case Study: Driving $3.3 Million in Additional Profitability Through Smarter Data Use

Our client, a direct-to-consumer marketer of financial products, faced a hidden challenge that was significantly impacting their marketing efficiency and profitability. By purchasing mailing data from multiple vendors, they were unintentionally remailing the same potential customers—resulting in wasted resources and missed opportunities. With a direct mail database of 18 million records, the inefficiencies were costing […]

Oct 1

September 2024 New Car Sales

Cars continue to be more expensive and less affordable. In September 2024, the average price of a new car was $48,423, a 0.9% increase over August but a 0.4% decrease from September 2023.