Dealership CRMs have spent years getting better at conversations—but far less time thinking about what happens when it’s time to get paid. DriveCentric is betting that gap is no longer acceptable.

The dealership-focused CRM and engagement platform has announced a strategic partnership with Dealer Pay, a payments platform purpose-built for automotive dealers, to enable compliant payment collection directly inside DriveCentric. The move is designed to let dealerships complete the full workflow—from customer interaction to revenue—without jumping between disconnected systems.

Crucially, DriveCentric isn’t becoming a payments company. Dealer Pay supplies the regulated payments infrastructure, while DriveCentric embeds the capability into the CRM experience on both desktop and mobile.

Why Payments Are Moving Front and Center

Payment collection in dealerships has traditionally lived in the back office, separated from sales, service, and customer engagement tools. That separation increasingly feels outdated. Customers expect frictionless digital experiences, regulators expect airtight compliance, and dealers want fewer manual handoffs that slow deals and introduce risk.

By integrating Dealer Pay, DriveCentric aims to make payments a natural extension of engagement rather than a separate operational step.

“As the premier customer-centric engagement platform, we believe CRMs should orchestrate the entire customer journey across every touchpoint and every department within the dealership,” said Matt Leone, CEO of DriveCentric. “By embedding payments directly into DriveCentric, we’re extending the CRM engagement lifecycle through the point of revenue collection.”

The implication is clear: engagement that stops short of revenue is incomplete.

Dealer Pay Handles the Hard Parts

For DriveCentric, the partnership is as much about focus as expansion. Rather than building payments in-house, the company is leaning on Dealer Pay’s domain expertise in dealership-specific compliance, accounting workflows, and regulatory requirements.

“Engagement alone isn’t enough anymore,” said Julie Douglas, Founder and CEO of Dealer Pay. “Dealers expect systems to deliver outcomes. This partnership brings payments expertise and compliance into the CRM experience—so engagement doesn’t stop short of revenue.”

That distinction matters in automotive retail, where payment handling is tightly regulated and deeply intertwined with dealership accounting systems. A generic payments layer wouldn’t cut it; Dealer Pay is designed specifically for dealership realities.

A Broader Platform Strategy

The announcement fits neatly into DriveCentric’s broader platform strategy: remain laser-focused on customer engagement while expanding its ecosystem through bi-directional partner integrations. Instead of turning the CRM into an all-in-one monolith, DriveCentric is positioning itself as the orchestration layer—where conversations, data, and now payments converge.

This approach mirrors a wider MarTech and AutoTech trend. Leading platforms are increasingly choosing partnerships over vertical integration, allowing specialists to handle complex domains like payments while the core platform concentrates on experience and workflow.

For dealerships, that could mean fewer tools, fewer logins, and fewer dropped balls between departments.

What Dealers Should Expect Next

The integrated payments capability is expected to be available in Q1 2026, and both companies plan to outline the operational implications during a keynote-style session at the DriveCentric booth at NADA 2026.

If successful, the partnership could signal a shift in how dealership CRMs are evaluated. The next generation of platforms may not be judged solely on lead management or messaging features, but on how effectively they help dealers move from conversation to cash—securely, compliantly, and without friction.

In that sense, DriveCentric’s move isn’t just about payments. It’s about redefining where the CRM’s responsibility ends—and increasingly, that endpoint looks a lot like revenue.

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