For decades, the automotive export industry has been a booming part of the global economy. Throughout history, this industry has evolved in interesting ways, as it relies on innovation to remain competitive with other industries around the world.
Car manufacturers across the globe are producing exceptional vehicles that are in high demand. From luxury sedans to sporty coupes, there is a car for everyone. And, thanks to the growth of the automotive export industry, consumers now have more choices than ever when it comes to purchasing a new car.
In today’s environment, an automotive exporter with a legacy built on trust, innovation, and transparency is an indispensable resource. That’s what you can expect—a trusted and knowledgeable source—when you choose to partner with Techlantic and TRADE X.
Techlantic was founded as a family-run company back in 1983 and has since grown into a trusted brand with extensive experience and unwavering integrity in the automotive industry.
Techlantic was and continues to be, an early member of the European Association of Independent Vehicle Traders (EAIVT) and a founding member of the North American Automobile Trade Association (NAATA).
As the trusted name for automotive logistics and trade finance, Techlantic has a strong history of helping to regulate the industry to ensure that companies interact with high levels of integrity and accuracy.
For TRADE X, this reputation was a key selling point as the company sought to enhance its global automotive trading ecosystem by pairing it with Techlantic’s decades of knowledge and relationships.
Working together with Techlantic, TRADE X is transforming into the automotive industry’s most trusted export-solutions ecosystem, providing a more efficient cross-border automotive trade process and offering capital-efficient, global-trade financing solutions in line with today’s modern trade transaction.
Utilizing Techlantic’s foundation and combining it with TRADE X’s mission to add actionable intelligence to global automotive trade, TRADE X envisions creating solutions that can be leveraged by importers and exporters all over the world. Both companies have an extensive network of logistics partners for warehousing, loading, and homologation of vehicles and, as the two companies integrate, there is a large benefit to combining their hubs to provide a single-point solution to manage international logistics and homologation reliably.
Redefining Industry Benchmarks
Integrity, innovation, accuracy, trust, and transparency—these are values that TRADE X and Techlantic share. By continuing to adhere to these founding core values, they can offer a compelling service proposition to clients.
By focusing on customer service, understanding the local regulations of the markets, and minimizing industry stress, TRADE X provides unprecedented transparency in global automotive trade.
Any user transacting in the TRADE X ecosystem can be confident the vehicles will be accurately represented, payment will be secure and safe, and vehicles will be delivered to their destinations through TRADE X’s rigorous and automated logistics process.
The TRADE X ecosystem is the only provider of a global automotive platform for car dealers, fleet owners, rental companies, mobility solution providers, OEMs, importers, and exporters, providing trade finance, homologation, currency exchange, sourcing, price discovery through data, and enhanced data analytics powered by the TRADE X Brain, all integrated into a trusted platform service rooted in automation.
Outside of the TRADE X ecosystem, automotive trade is hyper-fragmented and disconnected, but by creating a platform for vehicle traders, the process can be simplified through one end-to-end solution. This reduces the market friction and increases the efficiency of each trade, providing transparency and trust for each party involved.
Unlike manual methods for cross-border international trade, which rely on industry connections and processes that aren’t fully trusted, TRADE X utilizes its proprietary AI machine-learning BRAIN technology which ensures consistency through reliable market data on each aspect of the trade so that everyone in the industry benefits from an automated, fully transparent process.
Excellence Under the Right Leadership
TRADE X’s success is supported by industry veterans Ryan Davidson, CEO, and Luciano Butera, COO. Eric van Essen, Managing Director at Techlantic, will complement Trade X’s leadership team, by adding expertise that will help fuel its growth and expand into different markets.
Eric van Essen is the second generation to run Techlantic and has successfully built on Techlantic’s long history of success. Through his technical expertise and engineering background, Eric has further elevated the company, digitizing many of its processes to provide further efficiency and growth.
Likewise, Ryan Davidson was raised in a family whose history to the automotive industry goes as far back as the 1920s. Ryan quickly realized there was something beyond buying and selling cars locally and eventually channeled his passion for trading into TRADE X.
Using technology as a basis for his trading business, Ryan initiated the creation of TRADE X’s global trading platform that provides for a more efficient global ecosystem for cross-border trade.
A demonstrated leader in the automotive industry, Luciano Butera offers multi-dimensional expertise to TRADE X. Having grown up in an automotive group family, Luciano became a skilled professional in the business’s operations and later went on to become a corporate lawyer hyper-focused on automotive services and solutions.
This allowed him to infuse risk mitigation, credit analysis, and legal discipline into the automotive trading process, generating positive industry changes for companies such as Cox Automotive, where he was one of the principal architects of their cross-border financing portfolio development for its Canada-U.S. floor-plan businesses.
Tech-Driven Progress
The TRADE X team speaks persuasively about how the adoption of modern technologies has impacted the logistics industry. Given the challenges that currently exist when trading vehicles internationally, they have consistently sought to infuse trust into the logistics and trade finance process by providing greater transparency.
From a consumer standpoint, the market expectation for online shopping is that full visibility should be provided from start to finish, allowing buyers to monitor the timeline for product arrival and maximizing the efficiency of capital deployment. With automotive trade across borders, traders don’t typically have access to that information, and even less so, when dealing with distant countries.
Historically, a dealer has no way to access this tracking information, which is incredibly important for a depreciating asset. A major driving factor for B2B traders’ willingness to trade globally is that they receive the same level of service and visibility—such as tracking a shipment—that a consumer might expect when ordering an item on Amazon.
That kind of transparency and data-sharing adds impressive value to the industry and is just now being built into the supply-chain process of cross-border automotive trade. It has become more about integrating the multiple components of the supply chain—the logistics, the trade financing, the currency exchange, the payment processing, the asset verification through condition reports—all into one system to create greater efficiency and accessibility. These changes garner more trust from users in the ecosystem.
By standing as the trusted third-party intermediary, TRADE X, with the aid of its proprietary software, provides peace of mind and security for dealers in its network, offering transactional financing for buyers, global pricing analytics for sellers, digital documentation, international payments, global forwarding, automatic language translations, and much more. Fundamentally, TRADE X seeks to simplify the worldwide vehicle purchase and sale experience, and ensures each transaction is compliant, insured, and monitored from the start.
TRADE X’s AI-driven technology aggregates supply and demand among the world’s automotive dealers, opening up new trading corridors for them to buy and sell vehicles seamlessly across borders. Dealers can search for specific vehicles and post vehicles for sale across vast geographic areas, leverage arbitrage opportunities, obtain trade financing and transact in the currency of their choice. The TRADE X ecosystem will be available to dealers everywhere, 24/7, through a user-friendly, multi-lingual app on mobile, tablet, or desktop.
Overcoming Adversities
Throughout the pandemic and with the various restrictions impacting their businesses, Techlantic and TRADE X have aligned closely with public health officials. To ensure the safety of their team members vendors and clients, the team has successfully followed all safety protocols and maintained safe operations.
In the era of COVID-19, the biggest challenges they experienced were logistical in nature, primarily the start of the pandemic. Like many businesses, operations had to pause due to shutdowns, which, for them, meant closure of registered import, export, and titling offices.
During this time, however, they also experienced a positive change in how business was conducted. They hosted more web meetings, which created a more effective option that allowed for greater contact with clients and suppliers barring safety or travel issues. This helped to increase the trust between parties, as the web meetings were no different from face-to-face meetings, only conducted in a more accommodating way.
After the industry reopened, the market started to heal–businesses began operating somewhat normally, which created an increased demand for used cars. This was due to people no longer feeling safe on public transport or with ridesharing.
The TRADE X team believes the industry will normalize soon globally, and automotive production will get back on track, but the industry will likely retain some of the lessons they were forced to learn throughout the pandemic.
A String of Invaluable Knowledge
What advice do Ryan and Luciano have for entrepreneurs who wish to venture into the automobile trade and logistics industry?
“We believe that moving forward, transparency is the new currency, and investing in technology that delivers transparency will be critical to fostering the creation of a successful and disruptive automotive trading ecosystem business. Entrepreneurs need to create more efficient platforms with fully-integrated services and a focus on using data to optimize commercial decision-making to outmaneuver the existing players that have failed so far to properly leverage technology.”
Towards New Horizons
Sharing their vision for scaling TRADE X’s operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond, Ryan and Luciano explained that, together with Techlantic, TRADE X will be able to create more options for global trade financing while continuing to open new markets to its proprietary ecosystem.
Ryan and Luciano recognize how fortunate they’ve been to secure strong partnerships and expand TRADE X’s global presence. Looking ahead, they plan to continue growing TRADE X’s ecosystem to help vehicle traders worldwide out of the current supply struggles and into a strong technology-enhanced, trade-efficient environment.
“We are changing the way cross-border automotive trade is done and solving an archaic trade process through transparency, efficiency, and infusing technology with trade financing to accelerate its growth,” said Ryan. “Seeing the auto industry grow online in an interconnected and integrated way is TRADE X’s ultimate vision.”
