Ford Motor Credit Company

Our 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 LLC. Since 1959, Ford Motor Credit has offered automotive financial services to dealerships and customers around the world. Ford Motor Credit is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ford Motor Company.

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 Asia Pacific, Africa and Latin America. Across the globe, Ford Motor Credit offers financing options appropriate for local markets.

Ford Motor Credit offers products primarily in 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 to acquire and refinance dealership real estate

Ford Motor Credit works on a number of issues of interest to its stakeholders, including the following:

• Quality: In 2007, Ford Motor Credit once again performed well in the annual J.D. Power and Associates Consumer Financing Satisfaction StudySM, which measures customer satisfaction with the new-vehicle financing process. Ford Motor Credit earned the top score among all non-luxury loan providers and earned the second-highest scores in the luxury loan, non-luxury lease and luxury lease categories, based on surveys of more than 24,000 consumers.
• Consumer Education: Ford Motor Credit is a founding member of AWARE (Americans Well-informed on Automobile Retailing Economics), a collaboration among lenders to educate consumers about auto financing. Ford Motor Credit's participation extends its longstanding support of financial education through such organizations as Jump$tart and Junior Achievement. By helping consumers make informed decisions, AWARE works to ensure that financing remains available and affordable to a broad spectrum of consumers. For more information, available in Spanish or English, visit www.autofinancing101.org or www.autofinancing101.org/spanish/.
• 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.
• Identity Theft: Ford Motor Credit is also a founding member of the Identity Theft Assistance Center, a nonprofit industry association in which member institutions collaborate to protect their customers from fraud and help them recover if they are ID theft victims.