Announcing the Awards – a first for the local industry – Pieter Wessels, Managing Director at Lightstone Auto, explained that Lightstone Auto has created an incentive programme to acknowledge excellence among F&I managers serving the automotive industry. “The incentive programme will encourage digital adoption and motivate best practice and performance within the F&I sector.”

The Star Reacher F&I Awards programme, which officially commenced on 6 April 2021, will be available exclusively to Lightstone users and clients through the organisation’s bespoke Signio platform. The platform ensures ease-of-entry and accurate performance tracking throughout the competition, which will run until the end of March 2022.

The objective of the programme is to encourage participants to earn stars in different focus areas such as Signio eLearning, Value-Added Product (VAP) sales, insurance leads, and digital adoption through the use of the Know Your Client (KYC) and Digital Signing Solution (DSS) functionalities on Signio. Each F&I Manager will be measured against various standards of excellence, focusing on professionalism, industry and best practice training, procedural diligence in F&I areas and improved client service.

Dealerships will be categorised according to historic transactional volumes with five segments ranging from small dealers to mega dealers.

Performance will be measured per quarter and the top performers in each dealer category will be recognised after each quarter. Overall achievers in the respective categories will be crowned at an awards ceremony in 2022.

According to Wessels, the programme does not only reward and recognise F&I managers as individuals in their professional development, it also has a positive outcome for the dealerships where they’re employed.

“A peak performing F&I Manager directly impacts the dealership’s bottom line. “At Lightstone Auto, we believe F&I managers have a critical role to play within the dealership environment, and we would like to do our bit to make sure good performance is recognised and celebrated,” concluded Wessels.