The International Automotive Remarketers Alliance has lined up two keynote speakers for its annual Summer Roundtable conference that will focus on two major industry issues: the Carvana purchase of ADESA and advances in electric vehicles and automotive technologies.

Ernie Garcia, the CEO of Carvana, will kick off the conference on Aug. 16 in a keynote presentation sure to delve into the company’s latest plans for ADESA, which it announced earlier this year it is in the process of acquiring and integrating into its operations.

For the closing keynote on Aug 18, Kristin Slanina, chief information officer of Parkmyfleet and managing director of Charge Across America, a 10-day professionally filmed electric vehicle rally from New York to Los Angeles, will expound on her decades of work across mobility, powertrain engineering, electric vehicles, and advanced technologies.

The annual IARA Summer Roundtable will he held Aug. 16-18 in Nashville, Tennessee. See detailed agenda and registration information.

Carvana Entrepreneur

Garcia co-founded Carvana in 2012 and has served as its president and CEO since then, according to his Carvana biography. Garcia is also chairman of the Carvana Co. Board of Directors.

Before founding Carvana, Garcia held various roles at the DriveTime Automotive Group, Inc. from January 2007 to January 2013. Those included roles as a financial during his first two years there, and as a managing director of corporate finance from December 2008 to November 2009. He then served as vice president, treasurer, and director of quantitative analytics until January 2013.

As director of quantitative analytics, Garcia was responsible for the firm’s ongoing development of consumer credit scoring models, and its use of those tools in retail vehicle sales deal structuring and vehicle price optimization.

Before DriveTime, Garcia was an associate in the Principal Transactions Group at RBS Greenwich Capital from 2005 to 2006, where he focused on consumer credit based investments.

In 2016, Garcia was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Mountain Desert region for the consumer technology category. Garcia, along with Carvana's co-founders, were included in Fortune's 40 Under 40 list in 2017.

Automotive Roles

In a career spanning three decades, keynoter Kristin Slanina's technological prowess and drive for excellence propelled her career as an outstanding woman in the male-dominated automotive industry, according to her official executive biography.

As CIO of Parkmyfleet, she works in creating the mobility hubs for today as well as the future.  She was the managing director of Charge Across America, where she drove an EV over 3,300 miles to gain first-hand insights for mass adoption.

In previous roles, she served as COO of TrueCar, an online portal for car-buying consumers and a network of more than 10,000 certified dealers.

She also worked as chief transformation officer of Thirdware, an IT consulting firm, where she led the Emerging Technology group and paved the way to augment Thirdware’s partner with Ford and other OEMs/Tier 1’s on vehicle software development, machine learning and blockchain technology.

Enticed by her unique background in automotive and digital innovation, she was wooed by Ernst & Young to create and develop their global mobility practice, advising clients on the future of mobility and smart cities. As the new executive director of Automotive & Transportation Mobility, she secured multimillion-dollar funding to develop the Tesseract (blockchain) platform.

Integrating blockchain innovation, automotive ecosystems, and strategic operational frameworks, Kristin defined and scaled EY’s future of mobility business model skyrocketing revenue $20 million globally in the first year.

IARA SUMMER ROUNDTABLE COMPLETE INFORMATION