J.D. Power signals retail goals with acquisition of Superior Integrated Solutions

This month, analytics giant J.D. Power acquired one of the largest finance-and-insurance software companies in the country and also launched a partnership with one of the biggest F&I product and training providers.

Both moves lay groundwork on the company's long-term ambitions to channel its data and industry reputation into profit streams, though an executive at J.D. Power said the timing of the announcements was coincidental.

J.D. Power purchased Superior Integrated Solutions Inc., the parent company of Darwin Automotive, on July 7. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. And on July 1, J.D. Power and JM&A Group announced they will collaborate on a line of F&I products.

The addition of Superior Integrated Solutions will lay the foundation for J.D. Power's new dealership technologies division. Superior Integrated Solutions CEO Phil Battista said the company's Edison, N.J., headquarters will be the site of future software expansion. The vision is to add more dealer-facing companies to the J.D. Power brand, as well as to potentially design other direct-to-dealer products.

"We wanted to be able to leverage our dealer brand with their consumer brand," Battista said. "Putting those two together is a win for us, especially in consumer-facing applications like digital retailing."

Battista remains in charge of his company under J.D. Power's ownership and adds president of the new technologies division to his responsibilities.
Doug Betts, president of J.D. Power's automotive division, said the acquisition of Superior Integrated Solutions was settled in the past three months, while the partnership with JM&A Group had been in the works for more than a year.

"We're not targeting a specific part of the industry," he said. "We're looking for the best tools across the industry that can help drive efficiency."

The new technologies division comes on the heels of the JM&A collaboration, which will launch this year with a certified pre-owned vehicle protection product. J.D. Power's joint product line also will be offered on Darwin's platform, Betts said, alongside other industry options.

"It made sense for us to get into that business," Betts said. "And we knew we wanted to partner with someone who really knew how to do it."

J.D. Power's moves come at a time of great expansion and competition in the digital retailing space. Consumer adoption of online vehicle sales has skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic and prompted a proliferation of partnerships, acquisitions and new entries to the space. Automakers are developing branded digital retailing tools, and dealership management system giants CDK Global Inc. and Reynolds and Reynolds Co. have expanded with acquisitions of their own.

J.D. Power enters the fray with mountains of consumer and dealership research, as well as programs such as the National Automobile Dealers Association's used-car guide and other investments that provide industry data central to facilitating vehicle transactions. This differentiates the analytics company from other digital players that must rely on third-party integrations to complete transactions, Betts said.

"There's a huge transition happening with digital retailing, and more and more, the data exists to be able to decide what we should offer a person for their trade, what used cars are worth and what the lease rate should be," he said. "We're accumulating data assets that will help power the software to make the right decisions and help carmakers and dealers sell cars efficiently."