There’s no question that dealerships need to move data to outside third parties to conduct business. And given the choice, you wouldn’t willingly choose an unsecured method. Reynolds is helping close unsecured data transfer by eliminating non-certified, third-party system access.

How real is the risk of non-certified system access? Consider a few examples of what we’ve seen happen:

• One third-party F&I vendor ran a program over a weekend and inadvertently deleted all bank and leasing information from a dealer’s system.
• Over 150 dealers’ business operations were limited for seven days when a third party corrupted five megabytes of data.
• One unauthorized third party was able to access an OEM’s system through a dealer’s DMS.

In a Digital Dealer article, industry expert Sandi Jerome stated, "It is time to stop the extraction of your data by third parties and move toward a more secure 'push' of your data." Reynolds agrees, and that’s why we will continue to enhance our DMS to minimize this risk.

While the ways you move data are changing to more secure methods, they should not limit your ability to work with the third parties you choose. You have choices on how you do this.