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The automotive financial services provider VW Financial Services (VWFS) and the management and technology consultancy Sopra Steria are becoming co-creators of an online platform for digital vehicle registration. Together, the two companies have founded the MyDigitalCar joint venture.
Since September 2023, car dealers, vehicle fleet and leasing service providers, car sharing providers and other companies are able to register their vehicles automatically via an online platform. A pilot project in Lower Saxony is already showing good success. The partners' medium-term goal is an ecosystem with offers for digital registration and a digital vehicle file that maps the life cycle completely digitally. Vehicle manufacturers, banks, insurance companies, certification service providers and providers of new services are involved.
Digital future of vehicle registration
For this purpose, the experts from Sopra Steria have developed a digital platform together with VW FS. This maps the entire approval process, from automatic or manual data collection, the submission of authorization-compliant applications to the digital confirmation of authorization-compliant applications – including digital signatures and digital powers of attorney as well as corresponding digital data returns.
Together with the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure and the Federal Motor Transport Authority, a solution was developed to replace the current approval practice. This is because current procedures for registering vehicles can be made much more economical and simpler. This is a challenge that the partners face together.
The automotive financial services provider and the management and technology consultancy are participating in a joint venture – a first in the automotive market.
Turnkey solution
Even before the official launch of the platform, it was extensively tested in pilot operation – with an exemption from the state of Lower Saxony. Volkswagen Leasing was the first major customer to register several hundred company cars digitally and in compliance with the law at its Braunschweig sites since autumn 2019. MyDigitalCar was tested for its practicality, continuously developed functionally, and optimized with regard to efficient and intuitive use in day-to-day business.
The platform is already available to other customers for preparatory extensive test and pilot use. Companies have the opportunity to test individual processes and extensions in detail before the nationwide introduction.
By leveraging the new approval platform, companies can achieve significant improvements and cost savings, as well as improve the customer experience and their own processes.
Key benefits for businesses:
- Process runtimes are significantly reduced. The MyDigitalCar frontend of the platform offers a turnkey service for new registration, decommissioning, transfer and re-registration for natural or legal persons to third parties or as self-registration with special functions for fleet operators.
- Via the "Immediate Driving" function, the registered vehicle with the digital registration confirmation can be used directly in road traffic.
- The data and system integration enables the transfer of already digitally available vehicle or owner data. Re-entry is not required. As an alternative to using the MyDigitalCar frontend, an API gateway offers a complete "invisible" integration of the platform into your own IT landscape.
- The significantly reduced official registration fees for digital registration enable attractive offers for customers.
- The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model of the MyDigitalCar platform ensures calculable costs via transaction-based billing. The sales option as a reseller offers attractive approaches to expanding one's own product portfolio and cross-selling.
Together into a paperless future of vehicle registration
The co-creation result is impressive: The MyDigitalCar approval platform is a modern state-of-the-art cloud platform with proven software architecture and proven standard components. At the same time, it offers the highest level of IT security. MyDigitalCar's range of services covers the entire registration process and is to be successively expanded to include additional services. This includes the fact that previously analogue services such as courier trips for vehicle documents and the attachment of license plates will be shifted to the digital world on MyDigitalCar in the future.
The digitization of vehicle registration initiated by the new platform is an essential prerequisite for the medium-term goal: a completely digital vehicle file. In the future, it is intended to map the vehicle life cycle completely digitally and make paper documents superfluous.
The solution deployed for MyDigitalCar relies on the AWS cloud platform, particularly leveraging AWS native solutions to offer the following features:
- Scalability: achieved through autoscaling functions implemented on Kubernetes clusters (via the managed AWS EKS service for Kubernetes deployment and management)
- Very high availability: achieved by deploying across multiple availability zones
- Security and protection against attacks: provided through AWS WAF and AWS Shield.
- Monitoring and logging capabilities: utilizing monitoring and traceability solutions offered by AWS (AWS CloudWatch and CloudTrail).
- Repeatability and maintainability of the entire system through Infrastructure as Code deployment (using CloudFormation & Terraform)