Westar Financial Reports Start of Private Label Operations in Pennsylvania
23 October 2000
Westar Financial Reports Start of Private Label Operations in Pennsylvania
OLYMPIA, Wash. & PITTSBURGH--October 23, 2000 --Westar Financial Services Incorporated (OTC:WEST), the leading automobile e-finance portal, today reported that its new Private Label program, offered in conjunction with a top-25 U.S. bank, is producing significant volumes of prime credit automobile lease originations since its entry into Pennsylvania in August."We are delighted with the enthusiastic response our Private Label program has generated during its first 60 days of operations in Pennsylvania," stated Darcy Huffman of Westar's Strategic Alliance Group. "With 155 franchised new car dealers already signed to produce leases for Westar, this has been our most successful launch. That it is our second Private Label partnership a continent away from our base of operations has added to the challenge but also to our sense of success. It reinforces the competitive advantages Westar can offer its institutional strategic partners. With its unique and proprietary LASIRpro(TM) system, Westar can offer near real-time decisioning capabilities to its strategic partners across time zones and across borders."
"We will expand outside of Pennsylvania in very short order," she added.
WEST is the leading publicly traded automobile-oriented financial portal. Westar originates, decisions, commits to and fulfills consumer financings for itself or others using sophisticated decisioning tools and high speed communications to assure transparency to all parties to the transaction. A financial portal is a conduit through which a physical transaction nearly instantaneously is transformed into a financial instrument, which is then placed with the appropriate ultimate investor. Uniquely, Westar simultaneously operates in four separate origination channels. Through DriveOff.com, recently acquired by MSN CarPoint, a subsidiary of Microsoft (NASD:MSFT), Westar completed the first entirely electronic Internet automobile purchase and lease transaction in October 1999. The company operates its Dealer Direct leasing program in western states and is rapidly expanding its e-finance activities nationally through alliances with DriveOff.com, AmSouth Bancorporation, Mellon Bank and others.
Statement regarding "Forward Looking Statements": Statements concerning future performance, developments or events, including projected profit and loss levels, expansion of operations, growth of loan originations, quality of the company's lease portfolio, the ability to place securitizations, success of the e-commerce model, trends in interest rates, various statements concerning expectations for growth or profits and any other guidance on future periods, constitute forward-looking statements which are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties which might cause actual results to differ materially from stated expectations.