F&I Just Set a Per-Unit Record. Dealers Say They Still Cannot Present It the Same Way Twice.

F&I quietly became a front-end number

The Presidio-NCM Average Dealership Performance Benchmark for the second quarter of 2026 is being read, reasonably, as a margin-compression story. Net pretax profit at the average US franchised dealership fell 11.8% year over year. Gross profit per new vehicle retailed fell 13.5% to $1,840. Used-vehicle gross profit fell 10.0% to $1,409.

The line worth more attention sits in the same data set. Finance and insurance income reached $1,769 per retail unit, up 4.8% year over year and the highest quarterly figure in Presidio-NCM tracking history. The benchmark aggregates results from more than 4,000 franchised dealerships, so this is not a small-sample artifact.

Line those up and the shape of the deal has changed. F&I per unit is now within $71 of new-vehicle front-end gross and $360 ahead of used. Fixed operations, meanwhile, generated 52.8% of total dealership gross profit in the quarter, up from 50.1% a year earlier. The front end is no longer where most of the money is, and F&I is no longer a back end in any meaningful sense.

"As vehicle margins tighten, the conversation should shift to execution," NCM Associates CEO Paul Faletti said when the benchmark was released.

Execution is where a second piece of early-August research gets uncomfortable.

Myth vs. data

• The myth: F&I is getting harder because payment-stressed buyers have stopped saying yes to products.
• The data: F&I income per retail unit set an all-time record in Q2 2026 (Presidio-NCM), and among dealer principals whose stores offer a structured payment program, nearly 60% say customers respond positively or very positively, with another 29% saying customers respond well when the program is clearly explained (AutoPayPlus dealer survey, fielded July 2026).

Dealers grading their own consistency

AutoPayPlus fielded an online survey in July 2026 and presented it to more than 2,000 automotive dealership professionals, with results reported by Auto Remarketing on August 7. Read it with the source in mind: AutoPayPlus sells a structured payment program, so it has a commercial interest in dealers concluding they under-present one. The findings that travel further are the ones where dealer principals are describing their own operation.

The internal contradiction is the interesting part. Dealer principals name tracking and pay plan alignment as the two things that most determine whether a product gets presented consistently - ahead of training, ease of explanation, and executive enthusiasm - and then only 17% treat pay plan fit as the primary filter when deciding whether to add the next product to a menu that already carries eight or more.

Menu fatigue and compliance pressure tied as the top challenges facing F&I departments at 23% each, followed by tightening consumer budgets at 21%. Notably, roughly 60% of dealer principals said customer trust in the F&I office has held steady over the past three years, and only 14% believe customers have become noticeably more skeptical. Whatever is limiting F&I, dealers themselves do not think it is eroding trust.

The customer's version of the same story

CDK Global's 2026 State of F&I at the Dealership study points the same direction from the other side of the desk. For the second consecutive year, customers ranked the F&I office as the most trusted step in the dealership workflow, and 90% reported satisfaction with it.

The friction is in getting there. According to the study, 46% of customers waited more than 20 minutes to get into F&I, and much of that wait traces to duplicated work: credit applications signed both outside and inside the office, driver's licenses requested more than once, online steps repeated in person.

CDK F&I product marketing manager Jason Swiech's prescription, in a July interview with CBT News, was sequencing rather than software. Have the rate and budget conversation at the beginning. Run credit earlier so the payment does not move once the customer sits down. Introduce products earlier in the sales process instead of saving them all for the box, which otherwise becomes what he described as a wall between the customer and the finance office.

Why this shows up on the phone first

Sequencing things "earlier" has a practical endpoint. Earlier than the desk is the showroom greeting. Earlier than the greeting is the phone call.

And the phone call is where the affordability conversation now starts by default. NADA's Market Beat report for July 2026 put the average monthly payment on a new-vehicle loan at a record $808, up 3.3% year over year, with average new-vehicle financing rates at 6.54% and incentive spending up 8.1% to $3,451 per vehicle. July light-vehicle sales came in at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 16.3 million, down 1.4% year over year, with year-to-date SAAR down 2.2%. CDK's separate July car-buying ease reading held at 81%, below the 86% recorded a year earlier, with price negotiation and trade-in values accounting for most of the decline.

When the payment is the deciding variable, the payment question comes early, and it usually comes by phone. What the store does with that question in the first three minutes decides whether F&I is a continuation of a conversation the customer already had or a reset of it. A share of the customers waiting more than 20 minutes in a lounge are waiting for a store to reconstruct information they already volunteered.

That reframes the consistency problem. A store cannot present F&I consistently if the inputs arriving at the desk are inconsistent - one call captures a budget and trade details, the next captures a name and a stock number. Related reading: what a missed or mishandled inbound call actually costs.

What to measure before automating anything

Five questions, answerable with a call log and a DMS, no purchase required:

1. What share of inbound sales calls contain a payment, rate, or trade-value question? Tag them for 30 days.
2. Of those calls, how many end with an actual budget figure and trade details written into the CRM, rather than a note reading "wants payment info"?
3. What percentage of delivered deals had credit run before the customer arrived? Compare time in the box and product penetration for that group against everyone else.
4. What is your median arrival-to-F&I wait, split by day of week and hour?
5. What is product penetration by product and by F&I manager? The AutoPayPlus survey found 52% of dealer principals already track penetration by individual product and only 4% have no formal tracking process, so most stores can answer this today.

If question two is where the answer falls apart, that is a capture problem, and capture problems are the narrow category where phone automation genuinely helps. If question four is where it falls apart, that is a staffing and workflow problem, and automation will not touch it.

What an AI phone agent should not be doing here

The honest case for AI in this workflow is narrower than most of the marketing around it.

An AI voice agent should not quote a payment, an APR, or a term. Quoting and advertising credit terms is regulated speech, and a phone system that improvises numbers creates exposure that no amount of appointment lift pays for. It should not present or sell F&I products either; that presentation belongs to a trained human, and in a growing number of jurisdictions disclosure requirements attach to the automated call itself - a subject covered in AI disclosure rules on the dealership phone and in our look at TCPA exposure for AI-driven outbound calling.

What it can reasonably do is answer, disclose, capture, and hand off: confirm the vehicle of interest, record the customer's stated budget and trade information in their own words, identify itself as an automated system where required, and route a documented call to a person who can quote real numbers.

That is consistency of capture, not consistency of selling. It is a smaller claim than the category usually makes, and it is the one this quarter's data actually supports.

The measured read

F&I set a per-unit record in the same quarter new and used gross fell double digits, and dealers themselves report that one common F&I program reaches the customer consistently only 39% of the time. Customers, for their part, trust the finance office more than any other step in the process and mostly complain about waiting and repeating themselves.

None of that describes a demand problem. It describes an execution gap that opens well before the customer reaches the desk - and increasingly, before they reach the store at all.

If the payment conversation at your store starts on the phone, that is worth measuring before it is worth automating. More on how we think about it at carbuki.com.

Sources

• The Presidio Group and NCM Associates, Presidio-NCM Average Dealership Performance Benchmark, Q2 2026, reported by Digital Dealer, "Average Dealership Profit is Down - but the Floor May Be in Sight," August 4, 2026: https://digitaldealer.com/news/average-dealership-profit-is-down-but-the-floor-may-be-in-sight/172689/
• Auto Remarketing, "AutoPayPlus survey uncovers where dealers see untapped opportunities in F&I product offerings," August 7, 2026: https://www.autoremarketing.com/subprime/autopayplus-survey-uncovers-where-dealers-see-untapped-opportunities-in-fi-product-offerings/
• CDK Global, 2026 State of F&I at the Dealership, reported by CBT News, "F&I office most trusted, but pain points remain, CDK Global survey finds," July 9, 2026: https://www.cbtnews.com/fi-most-trusted-cdk-global-survey/
• NADA Market Beat, July 2026, reported by CBT News, "July U.S. auto sales slip 1.4% as hybrids gain momentum and EV demand continues to cool," August 7, 2026: https://www.cbtnews.com/july-u-s-auto-sales-slip-1-4/
• CDK Global, July 2026 car-buying ease reading, reported by CBT News, "CDK finds car-buying ease stalls at 81% as dealers face pricing pushback," August 4, 2026: https://www.cbtnews.com/car-buying-ease-stalls-at-81-percent/