Tricolor’s New Loan-Service Team Is Locked Out of the Building

Inside the sleek glass-and-stone headquarters of Tricolor Holdings, the remains of an auto-lending juggernaut plunged suddenly into bankruptcy were visible everywhere. In one corner of the fourth floor office, there were scores of license plates, piled high. In another, there were stacks of car titles. The employees were all gone now, fired en masse when the firm went under, and the loan-collection system was down.

This was Sept. 16 — one week after the bombshell fraud allegations that sealed the company’s fate — and a small team of crisis managers from Vervent Inc. who rushed to Dallas to re-start the loan system was getting its first look at the damage. “It’s as if a tornado came through here,” Derek Gamble, Vervent’s chief compliance officer, would later tell a bankruptcy judge, “and we’ve got to rebuild that infrastructure, brick by brick.”