Dealer management systems house the information tied to the operation’s financial activity. Customer balances, repair orders, vendor invoices and accounting records can originate there even when the payment itself moves through a bank or another provider. More of the payment process is now being connected to those systems.
Tekion, Increase and Core Bank said they were partnering to put an operating bank account inside Tekion’s Automotive Retail Cloud. As announced late last month, Tekion is used by more than 2,000 dealerships.
The need for connectivity is visible in automotive retail. In an April PYMNTS interview with Amberly Allen, managing director of Priority Commerce Automotive, Allen described an industry in which money moves among dealerships, OEMs, lenders and service providers while fragmented infrastructure can limit transaction visibility. She said payment costs rank among dealers’ top expenses and pointed to funding speed and cash-flow predictability as other concerns for dealers.
Tekion Spend extends the connection into the bank account. Dealerships can open an FDIC-insured account in their name, hold funds and initiate payments from within Tekion’s platform. Core Bank provides the banking products and services, Increase provides the technology. Accounts payable is the initial use case.
Other providers have concentrated on connecting the payment to existing dealer systems.
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Reynolds & Reynolds partnered with Corpay in February on Reynolds Electronic Payables. The product lets dealerships route vendor invoices for approval and pay bills electronically instead of relying on processes that can include printing and signing checks and reconciling the resulting payments.
Corpay also has an integration with CDK Global that connects invoices, approvals and payments with the dealer’s existing workflow. A separate Corpay partnership with PBS Systems integrates accounts payable (AP) automation with the PBS v10 Dealership Management Platform.
Those integrations address some of the fragmentation that has been a point of friction across sectors. PYMNTS reported in August that PYMNTS Intelligence research found 89% of organizations use at least some AP automation, yet 67% still spend at least five days each month processing invoices. Employees can still end up moving information among systems and manually resolving payment exceptions when the underlying workflows aren’t connected.
Dealerships have dealt with versions of that problem for years. PYMNTS reported in 2022 that dealers hiring vehicle transporters could be writing dozens of checks a month that then had to be mailed and reconciled. Autosled said at the time that 90% of the B2B payments it received from dealers were checks. Though that reporting is four years old and shouldn’t be treated as a measure of current dealer payment behavior, it illustrates the manual process that newer AP integrations are designed to address.
The same connection is developing on the receivables side. Reynolds’ ReyPAY also connects payment processing with its dealership system and reconciliation.
Where the Bank Fits
Priority Commerce provides one example of payments companies expanding within the automotive vertical without putting a bank account inside the dealer management systems. Its 2025 acquisition of Dealer Merchant Services added a payments business serving more than 1,000 auto and truck dealerships. PYMNTS reported at the time that the transaction brought Dealer Merchant Services’ dealership payments business together with Priority’s payables and treasury-management offerings.
While moving money is only one part of a business payment, the transaction also has to be associated with the invoice, customer obligation or other record that explains it. For banks serving dealerships, the development creates another distribution model for banking services.
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