Consumers who want a smart home but don’t necessarily have the cash on hand to finance the products and installation, have a new option from Control4 (Nasdaq: CTRL), a leader in home-automation technologies including lighting controls, security, energy management and entertainment.
Control4 has teamed with GreenSky, a financial services firm, to help consumers finance their installations through professional home-technology integrators.
“Consumer financing is something that many of our dealers use, but many more don’t have access to it,” says Control4 CFO Mark Novakovich in an interview with CE Pro.
Novakovich notes that many of the industry buying groups offer consumer-financing options, but Control4 has more than 2,700 dealers in North America and most of them do not belong to such a group or they simply have not sought out financing services.
In any case, Novakovich believes Control4 has found an unusually strong partner in GreenSky, which was selected after an extensive “bake-off” among leading financial services firms.
“We thought their rates were affordable,” he says, “but more importantly, they’re entirely paperless with a quick application process.”
Many competitive firms require multiple back-and-forths with paperwork from consumer application to job completion and payment.
In the case of GreenSky and Control4, the consumer “enters their information online, submits the application and gets approval in 48 hours,” Novakovich explains. “The process of accessing credit and paying the dealer is all app-based.”
In fact, GreenSky bills itself as a “credit technology platform provider,” bringing together financing options from some of the largest federally-insured banks in the U.S.
As with other financing programs in the home-technology channel, Control4’s is not limited to its own products. GreenSky will finance an entire job – including products, installation and other services – from Control4, service contractors and other product vendors.
Novakovich doesn’t believe the new program will have a major impact on Control4’s bottom line, but he sees the service as a “dealer lubricant” that “might help the timeline of some projects and may help close a deal.”
GreenSky offers a number of competitive financing plans which might include no interest, reduced APR, and same-as-cash options.
Control4 dealers can sign up for the new program in January 2016.
