Written By: Alysha Webb
Is Transparency a Competitive Disadvantage?
In March, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent letters to 97 dealerships warning that advertised vehicle prices must reflect the total price a consumer would have to pay.
As Bert Rasmussen, shareholder at the law firm Scali Rasmussen, explained during Rosenfield & Co.’s July webinar, the bottom line is simple: Can the customer buy the vehicle exactly as it sits for the advertised price?
Dealers shouldn’t view this as a negative, however, according to panelists in our September webinar, “Beyond Clear Pricing: Turning FTC Compliance into Operational Advantage.”
Jason Kopp, general manager of Autobahn BMW in Fort Worth, Texas, shared how his dealership approached compliance as an opportunity to improve its processes and enhance the customer experience, ultimately leading to increased sales.
The other panelist, Yuriy Demidko, chief technology and product officer at Clarivoy, an automotive attribution and measurement company, and former CIO of Fox Motors, explained how dealerships can strengthen their FTC compliance efforts while turning those same practices into a competitive advantage.
Though they approached the topic from two very different perspectives, Kopp and Demidko shared a common message: Transparency is about more than meeting regulatory requirements. It’s about creating a consistent, trustworthy customer experience supported by effective processes and technology.
Transparency Starts with the Customer Experience
Autobahn Fort Worth encompasses eight new-car dealerships in the Texas city, all but one representing luxury brands.
When the group began considering what compliance with the FTC’s pricing transparency guidelines would mean for its operations, it decided to look at the issue from the customer’s perspective, Kopp said. That meant considering what customers saw online, including on dealership websites and third-party platforms, and what they were told when communicating with the dealership by phone, email or text.
“If those things don’t line up, then it creates some friction within the transaction,” Kopp said.
Ultimately, the group recognized the importance of maintaining transparency and consistency throughout the customer experience.
Transparency matters to Autobahn for more than just compliance. “We represent mostly premium brands within our dealership group and our customers expect a premium experience throughout,” Kopp said. Helping customers understand what they are buying and what they are paying for is equally important. “That’s our number one job,” he added.
That means maintaining consistency throughout the buyer’s journey, which often begins with customers researching vehicles and comparing prices online, including on Autobahn’s dealership websites, competitor websites and third-party platforms. Customers can spot discrepancies between these sources in just a few minutes, he said. As a result, transparency starts long before a customer walks through the dealership’s doors.
Some dealers may believe that transparency hurts their bottom line, Kopp said, but in Autobahn’s experience, it can actually boost a dealership’s gross profit.
“You can still have a very profitable transaction with transparency,” Kopp said. “It’s just how you approach it. You know, the customer needs to trust the numbers.”
On the flip side, pricing discrepancies introduce friction into the transaction, leading to longer sales processes and diminished customer trust.
Aligning People, Processes and Technology
"If a product has a penetration rate above 85%, it could raise a red flag with the FTC. They’re going to look askance at your claim that it is truly optional."
Aligning those multiple “storefronts” was one of Autobahn’s biggest challenges, Kopp said. The problem is that the various systems don’t communicate with each other.
Customers associate any pricing discrepancy with the Autobahn name, regardless of where it appears. These inconsistencies can range from unclear disclosures to conditional incentives that customers assume everyone qualifies for. So, even before the FTC requirements were fully clear, “we jumped into it early so we could get ahead of the game,” Kopp said.
The group approached the challenge from three directions: people, process and technology.
On the technology front, software tools such as ComplyAuto can quickly identify potential compliance issues on dealership websites, Kopp said. The group’s marketing team addresses those red flags immediately using a process Autobahn created to solve any exception.
Beyond simply being compliant, vehicle pricing on the dealership website should be current, easy to find and consistent with in-store offers, Kopp said. He recommends mystery shopping your own website by pulling it up on your mobile phone and reviewing vehicle prices, incentives, payments and disclosures.
“Then ask yourself, if I knew nothing about the automobile business, would I understand it?” Kopp said. If an offer is too difficult to understand, simplify it.
The group learned a lot through mystery shopping not just the dealership website, but third party sites as well, Kopp said, and it started paying closer attention to the information on those sites. If the group found incorrect information, it assigned someone to own it and fix it. “A big part of this is transparency requires accountability, and you have to hold your people accountable to fixing these issues,” he said.
The real challenge, however, was with the people, Kopp said. Whether sales agents, BDC representatives, finance managers or other employees, everyone needed to communicate about pricing consistently. Salespeople also needed to reinforce the same pricing and conditions customers saw online.
The group added an addendum to its employee handbook outlining guidelines for pricing communications outside the dealership, including on employees’ personal social media accounts. Every associate was required to sign it, acknowledging the potential impact of these communications and the importance of following the dealership’s policies.
“Obviously, we want to protect our associates, but we want to protect our dealership as well,” Kopp said.
Fee disclosures can be a murky part of any transaction, and that is especially true at Autobahn Fort Worth because the group has a unique fee structure in which it charges a sales and service fee that serves as the salesperson’s commission.
The group decided to clearly disclose the fee on its websites, on vehicles outside the showroom, through QR codes and on third-party websites, Kopp said. Rather than viewing it as a competitive disadvantage, customers appreciated the transparency and knowing what the salesperson would earn, he said.
Making Transparency Part of Everyday Operations
Autobahn spent considerable time training its associates on how to explain the fee, Kopp said. The group then randomly asked salespeople to explain the fee to ensure they understood it and could communicate it clearly to customers.
“If we want one clear message across the board through your whole dealership group, we should be going to our associates every single day and making sure they understand how to explain it,” Kopp said.
Transparency also has to extend to the F&I office. Autobahn spent hours training its F&I associates to follow a process that ensures pricing, payments and other details are discussed on the showroom floor before customers enter the finance office, Kopp said.
Autobahn still presents F&I products, he said, “but we also are 100% compliant, and we want to make sure that we disclose everything the right way every single time and show value in the product.”
This emphasis on transparency has paid off for Autobahn Fort Worth, Kopp said. The group has experienced fewer pricing resets, cleaner handoffs to F&I and growth in F&I performance. An even greater benefit, Kopp said, has been improved customer satisfaction.
“We’re number one in the Southern Region for CSI for a reason, because we are transparent with our clients,” he said.
The key lessons Kopp aimed to impart:
- Make transparency an operating discipline, not just a compliance exercise.
- Continually audit all digital channels, platforms and pricing tools for consistency.
- Use technology to identify discrepancies and potential issues faster.
- Evolve with customer expectations as they change.
- Maintain accountability for resolving issues when they arise.
The Auditable Dealership Playbook
“I do believe that a dealership that supports a culture of compliance, a culture of pricing transparency, will be a dealership that will grow faster, that will have better customer reviews, that will ultimately also be bigger, bolder and more successful in the industry compared to somebody who is non-compliant.”
The FTC used to ask whether a dealership had a compliance policy, Demidko said. Now, it wants dealerships to prove that policy works. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Having an effective compliance program can actually make a dealership more efficient and its marketing more effective, he said.
“What I wanted to do was give some ideas and kind of a playbook of how to approach this and how that may help your stores.”
Demidko began by walking through the evolution of FTC requirements, starting with the Safeguards Rule in 2023, which required dealerships to establish formal information security programs. In 2024, additional breach notification requirements took effect, requiring covered dealerships to notify the FTC within 30 days of discovering certain breaches involving 500 or more consumers.
The CARS Rule, which included several pricing disclosure requirements, was vacated by a federal appeals court in January 2025. However, the FTC’s warning letters to 97 dealerships in March 2026 signaled its continued focus on pricing transparency and enforcement.
The Five Pillars of an Auditable Dealership
Dealerships tend to approach compliance using what Demidko called the “Binder Pattern,” essentially drafting a policy, putting it in a binder, signing it and placing it on a shelf. Under the FTC’s evolving enforcement approach, that alone may not be enough. Dealerships must be able to demonstrate how their compliance policies work in practice.
A quote Demidko likes is, “Compliance you cannot query is compliance you cannot prove.” It raises an important question: “Do you as a business know who is touching the consumer’s data that you have?” That includes understanding what the many vendors a dealership works with are doing with that data.
Demidko outlined a five-pillar approach to creating what he calls the “auditable dealership.” Each pillar addresses important compliance considerations while also offering opportunities to improve marketing effectiveness and operational efficiency.
The pillars are:
- Identity
- Consent Ledger
- Data Flow Map
- Exportable Logs
- Human in the Loop
Identity means one customer, one record, rather than separate records across the DMS, CRM, website forms and other platforms. When a customer’s information is spread across multiple systems, how can a dealership demonstrate to regulators that it has honored the customer’s opt-out request?
Making sure those records are “stitched together” to create a single customer record is crucial, Demidko said. This allows dealerships to more accurately trace the entire customer journey.
That single record is “the foundational concept for doing proper attribution, proper suppression lists, things that actually touch your marketing,” he said. Demidko also highlighted how his current company, Clarivoy, uses unified customer data to help dealerships better understand marketing attribution.
The second pillar, Consent Ledger, allows a dealership to document when a customer has agreed to receive marketing communications or opted out. The ledger should record which channel the consent came through, when it was given and whether the customer later changed their mind. It serves as a record of that customer’s journey, Demidko said.
For example, a customer may claim to have opted out of all marketing communications, but the ledger could show that they previously opted in through a platform such as CarGurus.
Beyond helping dealerships maintain compliance, a consent ledger can also reduce advertising costs, Demidko said.
“If you know someone opted in or opted out, you can clearly tell you are no longer doing that spray and pray approach I know a lot of organizations have been doing,” he said.
The third pillar, Data Flow Map, involves maintaining an inventory of every system through which customer data flows. Each vendor should be assigned an owner and a review date so dealerships can track which vendors have access to customer information and whether they are providing value. The Safeguards Rule already requires covered dealerships to oversee service providers that handle customer information, making vendor oversight an important part of compliance.
It is not uncommon for a dealership to be paying a per-rooftop fee to a vendor it is no longer using, Demidko said. Yet that vendor may still have access to customer data. A data flow map involves “having a simple inventory of who the vendors are and what you are actually sharing with them,” he said.
For vendors a dealership continues to use, Demidko recommended asking several questions to help evaluate their data security practices:
Can you produce logs of customer interactions if needed?
Do you use multi-factor authentication?
Can you provide a list of how you use our data, including whether it is shared with third parties? If they are sharing data with a third party who is breached, that data is exposed.
Will we be notified if a data breach occurs?
If we cancel our contract, will you delete our data from your systems?
If you claim SOC 2 compliance, can you provide a report demonstrating how you maintain those standards?
The fourth pillar, Exportable Logs, focuses on a dealership’s ability to produce records showing what happened within its systems, including customer interactions, consent history and timestamps. These records provide evidence of compliance rather than simply documenting that a policy exists.
Exportable logs are also essential when using AI, Demidko said. Dealerships need to understand what information went into an AI system, what came out and how the system arrived at its response. Without that visibility, it becomes difficult to investigate errors or determine what went wrong.
The fifth and final pillar, Human in the Loop, addresses the growing use of customer-facing AI. Dealerships should establish clear guidelines for when an AI chatbot must hand a conversation over to a human, particularly when discussions involve pricing, financing or other sensitive matters
“You probably don’t want to accidentally have a go-getter Claude or whatever start, you know, negotiating pricing with your customers,” Demidko said.
Dealerships should also be transparent about their use of AI. At a minimum, Demidko said, an AI system should identify itself truthfully when a customer asks whether they are interacting with a chatbot or a human.
Finally, Demidko recommended setting an end date for evaluating any AI tool or pilot program. Dealerships should avoid the sunk-cost fallacy of continuing to invest in a tool simply because they have already devoted significant time and money to it. If the tool isn’t delivering the expected results, they need to be willing to reconsider its use.
Four Steps Dealers Can Take in the Next 30 Days
“If you’re a CFO, it’s really all the things that benefit the bottom line also will make you meet those regulatory requirements,” Demidko said.
He suggested four practical steps dealerships can take over the next 30 days:
- Week 1: Review your vendor inventory and identify which vendors your dealership is actually using.
- Week 2: Ask vendors the key questions about data access, security and compliance.
- Week 3: Establish clear rules for when AI interactions should be handed off to a human.
- Week 4: Trace a customer’s journey across your dealership’s systems to identify gaps or inconsistencies.
These steps can help dealerships strengthen compliance, improve operational efficiency and identify opportunities to reduce costs, Demidko said.
Transparency as a Business Advantage
Although Kopp and Demidko approached transparency from different perspectives, both emphasized the importance of understanding and tracking the entire customer journey.
For Kopp, that means ensuring customers receive consistent pricing and information at every touchpoint, from their initial online research through the F&I office. For Demidko, it means having the systems, data and processes in place to document those interactions and demonstrate compliance.
Together, their insights reinforce a central message: Transparency doesn’t have to come at the expense of profitability. When built into a dealership’s everyday operations, it can help reduce friction, improve efficiency, strengthen customer trust and ultimately contribute to a healthier bottom line.
Did you miss the webinar?
Catch the full recording of “Beyond Clear Pricing: Turning FTC Compliance into Operational Advantage.” and download the slide deck below.
🎥 Watch the replay
📊 Download the slides
Have questions or want to talk it through? Connect with us or contact a member of our team directly for questions and expert guidance.
Explore our full library of past webinar recordings and recaps by visiting our Webinar Hub.
