Item 1. Business (Continued) We promote our retail financing products primarily through pre-approved credit offers to prospective customers, point-of-sale information, and ongoing communications with existing customers. Our communications to these customers promote the advantages of our financing products, the availability of special plans and programs, and the benefits of affiliated products, such as extended warranties, service plans, insurance coverage, gap protection, and excess wear and use waivers. We also emphasize the quality of our customer service and the ease of making payments and transacting business with us. For example, through our website located at  www.fordcredit.com  or via our FordPass mobile application, a customer can make inquiries, review an account balance, examine current incentives, schedule an electronic payment, or qualify for a pre-approved credit offer. We also market our non-consumer financing services with a specialized group of employees who make direct sales calls on dealers and, often at the request of such dealers, on potential high-volume commercial customers. This group also uses various materials to explain our flexible programs and services specifically directed at the needs of commercial and fleet vehicle customers. After we purchase retail financing contracts and operating leases from dealers and other customers, we manage the contracts during their contract terms. This management process is called servicing. We service the finance receivables and operating leases we originate and purchase. Our servicing duties include the following: Customer Payment Operations.  Customers may make payments by mailing checks to a bank for deposit in a lockbox account, through electronic payment services, a direct debit program, or a telephonic payment system. Collections.  We design our collection strategies and procedures to keep accounts current and to collect on delinquent accounts. We employ a combination of proprietary and non-proprietary tools to assess the probability and severity of default for all of our finance receivables and operating leases and implement our collection efforts based on our determination of the credit risk associated with each customer. As each customer develops a payment history, we use an internally developed behavioral scoring model to assist in determining the best collection strategies. Based on data from this scoring model, contracts are categorized by collection risk. Our centralized collection operations are supported by auto-dialing technology and proprietary collection and workflow operating systems. Through our auto-dialer program and our monitoring and call log systems, we target our efforts on contacting customers about missed payments and developing satisfactory solutions to bring accounts current. Supplier Operations.  We engage vendors to perform some of our servicing processes. These processes include depositing monthly payments from customers, monitoring, processing, and storing documents and certificates of title that reflect the perfection of security interests and ownership in financed and leased vehicles, imaging of contracts and electronic data file maintenance, storing and processing paper and electronic contracts, generating and sending billing statements and other written communications to customers, providing telephonic payment systems for retail customers, handling of some inbound and outbound collections calls, and recovering deficiencies for selected accounts. 6 Servicing Consumer Financing • Applying monthly payments from customers; • Maintaining a security interest in the financed vehicle; • Providing billing statements to customers; • Responding to customer inquiries; • Releasing our security interest on paid-off finance contracts; • Contacting delinquent customers for payment; • Arranging for the repossession of vehicles; and • Selling repossessed and returned vehicles.