Capital One Auto Navigator

Sanjiv Yajnik, the President of Financial Services at Capital One

Discussed the company's efforts to reimagine the car-buying process in his article titled "Auto Navigator: Disrupting Car Buying for the Sake of the Customer." According to a survey commissioned by Capital One, buying a car is more time-consuming than choosing a college or selecting a baby name, with 62% of car buyers feeling uncertain about whether they received a good deal during their last purchase. To address these concerns, Capital One introduced the first version of Auto Navigator in 2015, a cloud-based web application that simplifies the car-shopping process for customers. Customers can find, finance, and fulfill their next car purchase with ease, convenience, and confidence, and they can pre-qualify for financing with no impact to their credit score before ever stepping into a dealership.

In 2016, Capital One released the second iteration of Auto Navigator, which allows customers to browse over three million cars from more than 12,000 participating dealerships across the country. The company leverages real-time data to determine how much customers would pay for any of the cars in their database for any combination of factors. Capital One has continued to iterate on Auto Navigator, using human-centered design to build, fail forward, and improve the customer experience continuously.

At the 2018 SXSW Interactive Festival, Capital One unveiled the latest evolution of Auto Navigator in the form of a new functionality: an augmented reality feature. The company plans to offer an augmented reality experience to customers through the Capital One Mobile app, enabling them to scan cars via their mobile phones and view individualized information related to each car. This could include information such as their pre-qualified financing, their estimated monthly payment, nearby dealerships where they could buy the car, and much more.

Upon launch, the Augmented Reality feature will leverage Apple's recently-announced augmented reality framework (ARKit) and their new mobile machine learning framework (CoreML) as well as Capital One proprietary models to identify and price cars. The feature is also compatible with Android, using ARCore and Tensorflow mobile. Capital One optimized the experience so customers can scan multiple cars in a session, and get more information about a car they've already scanned (even after scanning several). Capital One's proprietary models are then utilized to customize the offer, so customers can see their estimated monthly payment.

Capital One's goal is to challenge the market for the sake of the customer, and Auto Navigator is one of their initiatives that help customers feel more confident about their relationship with their money. They provide an ultimate digital experience that fits more naturally into people's lives, and the company is continuously striving to improve and innovate the customer experience