Wall Street compliance experience.
Applied to your car deal.
Negotiated brings a different standard to automotive retail. Most car buying advisory services rely on dealership experience alone. We bring both. Our founder learned the dealership playbook as a Finance & Insurance Manager. He then spent nearly a decade on Wall Street, running regulatory matters at some of the most scrutinized financial institutions in the world.
Metry Shind
"I spent years structuring car deals from the dealer's side of the desk before moving to Wall Street to manage complex regulatory examinations. When you look at the automotive retail industry through the lens of a regulatory professional, the undisclosed markups and conflicts of interest are glaring. A dealer contract is simpler than a nine-figure consent order, but the mechanics of extracting hidden margin are exactly the same. I built Negotiated to manage those conflicts on your behalf."
During his years in automotive retail, Metry worked as a Finance & Insurance Manager inside a New Jersey dealership — structuring retail financing, presenting aftermarket product menus, managing lender relationships, and operating inside the same margin structures that Negotiated now reviews for clients.
When his career transitioned to the finance industry, that regulatory expertise operated at the highest level, managing primary relationships with multiple regulators simultaneously. The skills that governed enterprise remediation programs across corporate divisions — reading financial contracts at the rule level, identifying discrepancies, understanding exactly where a transaction is structured to benefit the institution over the counterparty — transfer directly to the dealership F&I office. The stakes are smaller. The tactics are identical.
What a compliance background sees in a dealer contract that most buyers miss.
Years inside G-SIB institutions produce a specific reading discipline: finding, immediately, where a financial document is designed to benefit the drafter at the expense of the party signing it. Dealer finance contracts are built the same way.
Dealer reserve is the margin between the interest rate a lender approves and the rate written into the contract you sign. The dealer keeps the difference. CFPB enforcement actions against major auto lenders targeted discriminatory patterns in how that markup was applied — not the existence of reserve itself. The markup is legal. It is also undisclosed. Identifying where it sits in a specific contract, and whether it's negotiable, is what this service does.
The F&I manager presenting and recommending products is compensated on every product sold. Most buyers have no visibility into that compensation structure. The person advising you on whether to buy GAP insurance, a service contract, or a paint protection package has a direct financial interest in your answer. That is an inherent conflict of interest — and one most buyers don't recognize until after they've signed.
Regulators focus on total economic exposure, not headline numbers. The out-the-door price — vehicle cost, fees, financed F&I products, and interest over the loan term — is the only number that reflects your actual transaction cost. Everything else is a distraction.
The career that built this service.
Studied financial analysis, corporate finance, and capital markets. The same analytical framework used to model credit risk and evaluate securities now drives every deal structure and F&I product review at Negotiated.
Structured retail auto financing. Managed lender relationships. Ran the dealership's aftermarket product portfolio. This is where dealership economics, reserve markups, and the information gap between the finance office and the buyer become visible from the inside.
Filed regulatory submissions under three frameworks: FINRA Rule 4230(b), SEC Rule 15c3-3, and Basel Committee on Banking Supervision reporting standards. This is where the discipline of reading contracts at the rule level was built — separating what a document actually says from what it implies. The same discipline now reviews every dealer finance contract for our clients.
Ran surveillance investigations. Managed Code of Ethics compliance programs. Monitored complex financial instruments for regulatory risk. This work trains a specific instinct — finding the points where financial structures create hidden conflicts of interest. Dealer reserve and F&I product markup are exactly that: hidden conflicts disclosed only when the buyer knows what to ask.
Directed enterprise-wide remediation programs across institutional divisions. Managed primary liaison relationships with seven federal and international regulators:
- Federal Reserve Board (FRB)
- Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC)
- Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)
- National Futures Association (NFA)
- Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
- Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA)
Orchestrated examination governance for the FRB's Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee (LISCC) — the supervisory program for the largest, most systemically important U.S. banks. Operating at VP level inside one of the world's most scrutinized financial institutions builds a specific instinct: finding exactly where a disclosed position diverges from the actual one.
Completed professional certificate programs in AI and Cybersecurity at Harvard, and Quantum Computing at Delft University of Technology. Applied the same analytical framework to automotive retail — mapping dealer incentive structures, F&I product economics, and the information gaps that define every dealership transaction.
The skills that identified undisclosed conflicts of interest in nine-figure consent orders are applied to the F&I office. The compliance instinct that caught violations in complex derivatives portfolios reads dealer contracts for markup and unauthorized charges. The difference is the stakes are personal — and the client is always you.
Four principles that govern every engagement.
We are paid a flat fee by you. We accept no referral payments, dealer incentives, or commissions of any kind. Our only financial incentive is your outcome.
We show you the math. We explain the dealer's position, the manufacturer's programs, and exactly where the margin is. You make decisions with full information.
Every engagement is specific to your vehicle, your market, your credit profile, and your financing structure. Nothing here is generic.
A negotiated price is not a complete deal. F&I contract review is a core part of our Full Purchase Concierge service — because the finance office is where most buyers lose the money they saved at the negotiating table.