Stopping halfway: what happens to an unfinished car loan application

Most sites in this category will not tell you when their record of you begins. Ours begins earlier than people assume, and this page exists because you should hear it from us rather than from a phone call three days later.

The record opens on the second screen

The application is one question per screen. Screen one asks what kind of vehicle. Screen two asks for a name, a phone number, an email address, and consent to be contacted.

At the point you complete screen two, a file exists. It is not a draft in your browser. It is a record on our side, and it stays there whether or not you reach the end.

Everything after that — work, income, address, housing — is added to a record that already exists.

Why it works that way

Two honest reasons, in the order of how much they explain.

The first is that most people who stop are not saying no. They are on a bus, the stop arrives, and the tab closes. A battery dies. A child needs something. The application takes a while because lenders need what it asks for, and a form that long is going to get interrupted. If the record only existed at the end, every interruption would be a lost application and the person would have to start from nothing.

The second is that it is worth something to us. A partial file with a name and a number is a lead. A specialist may call it. We are paid by dealers per application, so an interrupted application that we can follow up on has value to this business, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of thing this site exists not to do.

Both are true at once. The first is why the mechanism was built. The second is why it stayed.

What actually exists after you stop

Whatever you had entered by the last screen you completed, plus the consent record.

The consent record is the part worth understanding. Consent to be contacted is captured on screen two, separately, unticked by default, and with its own wording. It is not bundled into anything else, and it is not the same as consent to a credit check, which is captured at the very end and is also separate and also unticked.

So if you stopped at screen five, we hold what you entered on screens one to five and a record that you agreed to be contacted. We do not hold consent to pull credit, because that screen was never reached, and nothing about a partial application authorises one.

If you want it gone

Say so, and it goes.

• Reply STOP to any text message.
• Use the unsubscribe link in any email.
• Say so on a call — it takes effect for our messages immediately.
• Or email us with "privacy request" in the subject line and ask for the record to be deleted rather than just for contact to stop. Those are two different requests and it is worth being explicit about which one you want.

The contact route is on the contact page, and what we collect and who it goes to is set out in the privacy policy.

If a dealer already has it

Different situation, and this is the limit of what we can do.

Once an application has been transferred to a dealer partner, that dealer holds it and holds their own consent record. We cannot withdraw consent on your behalf with them, and a completed transfer cannot be undone. Asking us to take it back does not unsend it.

What we can do is tell you which dealer has it, so you can ask them directly. That is worth knowing before the final screen rather than after it, which is why it is on how it works as well as here.

Coming back to an unfinished application

If you stopped and want to continue, the fastest route is usually a call — the file is already there, and it is found by the phone number or email you entered. Starting the form again from the beginning also works and creates a second record that gets matched to the first.

Neither is a problem. The thing that is a problem is assuming that stopping halfway means nothing happened, and then being surprised.