From Engagement to Payment: Why DriveCentric Partnered with Dealer Pay

For years, automotive CRMs have focused on helping dealerships manage activity. Conversations, follow-up, tasks, reminders. All important, but increasingly incomplete.

Dealers today aren’t just asking, “What did my team do?”
They’re asking, “What actually got finished?”

One moment still breaks the experience more often than it should: when it’s time to get paid.

That’s why DriveCentric is partnering with Dealer Pay.

Not to become a payments company, and not to introduce another rigid process, but to ensure that real-time customer engagement doesn’t break down at the most critical moment.

Engagement Shouldn’t Stop When Money Is Involved

DriveCentric was built to replace rigid workflows with real-time customer engagement. Conversations happen everywhere, across sales, service, and operations, and our platform is designed to meet dealers where those interactions actually take place.

But in most dealerships, the moment payment enters the picture, everything changes.

Suddenly, the experience moves outside the systems where engagement lives. Hand-offs increase. Visibility drops. Customers feel the friction, even if they can’t always name it.

That disconnect isn’t just operational. It affects trust, customer experience, and brand perception.

Modern engagement shouldn’t end when the conversation turns into a transaction.

Why Partner, Not Build

Payments are not a simple add-on. They come with regulatory complexity, compliance risk, accounting implications, and dealership-specific nuances that most CRM platforms aren’t built to handle on their own.

That’s exactly why DriveCentric chose to partner.

Dealer Pay is purpose-built for dealership payments. Their platform is designed around compliance, operational controls, and the realities of how money moves inside automotive businesses.

By partnering with Dealer Pay, DriveCentric can enable payment collection within the CRM experience while staying focused on what we do best: engagement, visibility, and execution.

Dealer Pay handles the payments expertise behind the scenes. DriveCentric ensures the experience stays connected and consistent.

This Is Not About “Getting Into Payments”

It’s important to be clear about what this partnership is, and what it is not.

DriveCentric is not launching a payments product. We are not becoming a processor. We are not introducing new pricing conversations or fintech complexity into sales discussions.

This partnership is about continuity.

It’s about making sure that when a customer is ready to pay, the experience doesn’t feel like a reset. The same clarity, professionalism, and responsiveness that defined the engagement up to that point should still be there.

Payments become part of the engagement, not a break from it.

What This Means for Dealerships

For dealers, this partnership is designed to deliver three core benefits:

• A more consistent customer experience - Engagement feels continuous, even when money changes hands.

• Better visibility and control - Payments happen in context, not in disconnected systems.

• Reduced risk and complexity - Dealer Pay’s compliance-first approach ensures payments are handled correctly without forcing CRMs to improvise.

The goal isn’t to change how dealers work in DriveCentric. It’s to remove the friction that appears when engagement reaches its most important moment.

Looking Ahead

This partnership reflects a broader direction for DriveCentric.

We believe the future of dealership technology isn’t about stacking more tools or enforcing more steps. It’s about keeping engagement intact from the first conversation through the moment a transaction is complete.

We’ll be sharing more about this partnership, including how it fits into our broader platform vision, at NADA 2026 and beyond. Details around availability and rollout will follow as the integration progresses.

For now, the direction is clear: engagement shouldn’t stop when it’s time to get paid.