The headline is a good one. Consumer car finance new business volumes grew 7% in June 2026 compared with June 2025, and value grew 11%. The first half of the year finished 4% up on volume. New car finance did the heavy lifting: 70,614 cars in June, a 21% rise, worth £2,041 million.

Underneath it, a second story. Used car finance volumes were flat, at 116,690 agreements, with value up just 1%. Over the twelve months to June, used volumes were down 1% while new volumes rose 13%. The growth is real, and it is concentrated.

Why the split matters more than the headline

The used car market is where the harder applicants sit. Thinner files. Self-employed income. Variable pay, multiple jobs, recent job changes, credit histories with something on them. These are the customers whose actual financial position cannot be read off a credit file, which means they are the customers most likely to be declined for lack of evidence rather than lack of affordability.

A market growing 21% at the easy end and 0% at the hard end is telling you something about where the friction lives.

Geraldine Kilkelly, the FLA's Director of Research and Chief Economist, made the point that finance is now central to how people acquire cars, with FLA members funding almost nine in ten private new car purchases. When finance is the default route rather than an option, the quality of what sits underneath each decision stops being an operational detail.

If your decline rates look different at the used end of your book, it is worth understanding whether that is risk appetite or evidence availability. That is a conversation we have most weeks: book a call at sikoia.com/request-demo.

The bill for the last decade is still being paid

The redress scheme confirmed in PS26/3 puts the cost to firms at around £9.1 billion, with roughly 12.1 million agreements eligible. Speak to people inside motor finance lenders and the money is rarely what they describe. It is the reconstruction. Establishing what was known about a customer, and when, and proving it years after the fact.

Now put those two things next to each other. The industry is writing 187,304 new agreements a month while simultaneously discovering what it costs when the record behind an agreement is thin. Every decision made this month is a record that someone may ask about in 2036.

That is not an argument for lending less. It is an argument for lending on evidence you can produce later without a project team.

What that looks like in practice

Verification at the speed the market is now moving. Income and employment confirmed from source rather than estimated from a document photo. Affordability built on a complete view of commitments rather than the fragments a customer remembers to declare. Document integrity checked rather than assumed. And an audit trail created as a by-product of the decision, not reconstructed afterwards.

This is the layer Sikoia sits in. We aggregate a customer's data from every relevant source, verify identity, income, employment and affordability, and check the documents are genuine, so your team decides on complete, current, sourced data. Checks that took over 30 minutes by hand take seconds. The decision stays yours, mapped to your policy. The evidence is there afterwards.

The market is growing again. The firms that grow into the harder half of it will be the ones who can see those customers clearly, and prove what they saw.

See how it works: book a call here or email hello@sikoia.com.

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