Where it started
This week the National Auto Auction Association gathers in Seattle for the 2026 World Remarketing Convention. It has me thinking about where Rivet actually began: more than ten years ago, when I was building Global Dealer Exchange.
I loved the industry then and I still do. The independent auctions. The family-run businesses running complex operations around moving, selling, financing, settling and reconciling what happened to every vehicle. And one problem took hold of me and never let go.
The complexity of the multi-party transaction.
A single wholesale sale can involve a buyer, a seller, the auction, a floor plan lender, a transporter, an inspection company and a handful of other service providers. Documents move. Fees are calculated. Vehicles are released. Exceptions get resolved. Money moves in more than one direction.
Same counterparties, new transaction, same friction
These companies transact with each other over and over again.
Same auctions.
Same dealers.
Same lenders.
Same consignors.
Same service providers.
Yet every new transaction gets fragmented again across email, portals, accounting systems, spreadsheets, payment instructions and phone calls. The relationship is established. The transaction still starts from nothing.
If these businesses already have established relationships, why should every transaction between them be reconstructed and reconciled from scratch?
What that question became
That question became Rivet. Not by replacing the systems each company already runs: the auction’s management system, the dealer’s DMS, the lender’s floor plan platform, everyone’s accounting. By connecting those systems to the transaction itself.
Around the shared transaction sit the things that usually scatter: documents, approvals, exceptions, conversations, payments, and the record of what happened. The auction’s system, the dealer’s system and the lender’s system each read and write their side. Nobody re-keys anything.
The coordination tax
NAAA member auctions sold more than 8 million wholesale vehicles last year, representing over $100 billion in gross value.
- Wholesale vehicles sold by NAAA member auctions last year
- 8,000,000+
- Financial, operational or settlement events per sale
- × 3
- Events
- 24,000,000
- Administrative work per event
- × 15 min
- Loaded labor
- × $50 / hr
- Coordination and reconciliation work
- ≈ $300M
If those sales generate even three financial, operational or settlement events each, that is 24 million events. At 15 minutes of administrative work per event and $50 an hour in loaded labor, that is roughly $300 million of coordination and reconciliation work.
That is not an industry cost estimate. It is an illustration of the coordination tax that small amounts of friction create when they are multiplied across millions of transactions.
The opportunity hasn’t changed
Make one of the most complex multi-party transactions in commerce feel simple. Settle faster. Reduce costs. Reconcile less.
And as finance becomes agentic, the context underneath the transaction matters more, not less. AI can’t safely automate what it can’t understand. That is the infrastructure Rivet is built around: trusted identity, permissions, structured data, workflow state, evidence and money movement in one connected context.
If you’re in Seattle for NAAA this week, come find us. Otherwise, a 30-minute walkthrough of a real auction settlement is the fastest way to see it.
- Automotive remarketing
- NAAA
- Floor plan
- Settlement
- Connected commerce