The Digitalization of the Automotive Sector

The digitalization of the automotive sector is not advancing at the same speed in every area of the supply chain. While vehicles and services are becoming increasingly connected, payment management in Italian dealerships and workshops continues, in many cases, to rely on manual reconciliations, Excel sheets, and direct communications between departments.

This is the picture outlined by research commissioned by the German fintech Aufinity Group, which specializes in payment automation in the automotive sector. The survey was conducted between December 2025 and January 2026 with 108 individuals working in Italian dealerships or workshops and participating, directly or indirectly, in payment management.

Car Dealerships: A Significant Portion of Work Remains Manual

78.2% of respondents report dedicating at least a quarter of their time to manual payment-related activities. Only 21.8% claim they manage to keep these operations below 25% of their working hours.

The indicated activities include payment reconciliation, accounting adjustments, and sending reminders. When these steps are not connected to the management system, staff must check transactions, update records, and communicate separately with customers and other departments.

The lack of automation is the most frequently cited issue by 41.7% of respondents. This is followed by technical problems in integrating different systems, cited by 37%, managing open items and reminders at 36.1%, and communication burdens with clients at 33.3%.

Unintegrated Excel and POS Fragment Processes

31.5% of the sample reports still using Excel or manually compiled lists. About two-thirds of respondents work with traditional banking solutions, while 50.9% have a POS terminal that is not integrated with the management system.

The problem is therefore not necessarily the absence of digital tools but the lack of connections between these tools. A payment may have been completed through the banking circuit without the information being reported automatically back to the dealership's management system.

This fragmentation also affects the sales force. In 52.3% of cases, according to the research, sales staff verify whether a vehicle has been paid by directly contacting the accounting department.

On the supply side, only 16.3% of respondents report that their organization automatically informs the customer of the payment made. In 43% of cases, the communication is done manually.

Aufinity Focuses on Payment Integration

In this context, Aufinity's proposal aims to centralize payment flows and connect them to the management systems used by sales points, with the goal of automatically updating the status of transactions, reducing manual reconciliations, and making information accessible to various departments.

The company was founded in Germany in 2018 and operates in German-speaking markets under the brand bezahl.de. For international markets, it uses the Aufinity brand. The official entry into the Italian market was announced in March 2025. By the end of the same year, the company stated it had a European network of over 2,000 dealers and more than one billion euros in transactions managed monthly.

The system supports centralized payment management, real-time monitoring of transaction status, and reconciliation with records in the management system. The integration with Dealer Management Systems (DMS) aims to prevent sales, after-sales, and administration from having to manually exchange the necessary information to verify a payment.

Aufinity has made agreements with management software providers such as Keyloop and Visual Software. In the latter case, integration with Infinity DMS allows sales staff to check the status of a payment without requesting a separate update from administration.

The numbers on the platform's diffusion come from Aufinity itself and do not directly measure the benefits obtained by Italian dealerships. To evaluate the effectiveness of automation, independent comparisons on reconciliation times, operational costs, number of errors, and speed of confirmations before and after integration would be needed.

The research nonetheless identifies a concrete problem: digitalizing payment does not just mean adding a new channel, but connecting banks, POS, management systems, accounting, and sales. It is in this integration, rather than in the single tool, that the digital maturity of the process is measured.

"The automotive sector is undergoing a transformation that goes beyond sales: true competitiveness is played out on the ability of dealers to integrate their processes," says Paolo Procacci, Director of Sales - Southern Europe at Aufinity Group. "In 52% of cases in Italy, the sales force is still involved in administrative checks that should be automatic: it is not a problem of people, but of misaligned processes between sales, after-sales, and administration. This is where a dealer's competitiveness lies: freeing up hours lost in manual reconciliations and reinvesting them in relationships with customers. With Aufinity, dealers gain real-time control over financial flows and adapt strategies to the speed of the market."