Our corporate citizenship and sustainability reporting has traditionally focused on our automotive sector – the part of the business that designs and builds vehicles. The other major part of our business is Ford Motor Credit Company, a wholly owned subsidiary that began operations in 1959. Ford Motor Credit offers a wide variety of automotive financial services to automotive dealers and customers in countries throughout the world. Ford Motor Credit North America does business in every state in the United States and all provinces in Canada.
Outside the United States, FCE Bank plc is Ford Motor Credit's largest operation. The biggest share of FCE's business is in the United Kingdom and Germany, with smaller operations in most other European countries. Ford Motor Credit also operates in the Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America regions. Across the globe, Ford Motor Credit offers financing options appropriate for local markets.
Ford Motor Credit's primary financial products fall into three categories:
- Retail financing – purchasing retail installment sales contracts and retail leases from dealers, and offering financing to commercial customers, primarily vehicle leasing companies and fleet purchasers, to purchase or lease vehicle fleets
- Wholesale financing – making loans to dealers to finance the purchase of vehicle inventory, also known as floorplan financing
- Other financing – making loans to dealers for working capital, improvements to dealership facilities, and the acquisition and refinancing of dealership real estate
Ford Motor Credit works on a number of issues of interest to its stakeholders, including the following:
- Consumer Education: Ford Motor Credit joined with other lenders to form AWARE (Americans Well-informed on Automobile Retailing Economics), a collaborative effort to increase consumer understanding of the auto financing system. (See www.autofinancing101.org.) Ford Motor Credit's participation in AWARE extends its longstanding support of financial education for consumers through such organizations as Jump$tart and Junior Achievement. By educating consumers about auto financing and how to make informed decisions, AWARE works to ensure that financing remains available and affordable to a broad spectrum of consumers.
- Identity Theft: In partnership with other financial institutions, Ford Motor Credit is taking aim against identity theft as a founding member of the Identity Theft Assistance Center (ITAC). ITAC is a nonprofit industry consortium that helps consumers. Member institutions collaborate to protect their customers from fraud and help them recover if they are ID theft victims. After resolving issues at the member institution, customers are referred to ITAC, which helps them identify suspicious activity in their credit reports, notifies affected creditors, places fraud alerts with credit bureaus and shares information with law enforcement authorities.
- Customer Privacy: Safeguarding customer information is important to Ford Motor Credit, which uses systems, policies and procedures to maintain the accuracy of customer information and to protect it from loss, misuse or alteration. Customer information is accessible to appropriate personnel who have a business need for the information. Ford Motor Credit provides training and communications programs to educate personnel about our privacy requirements.
