How Don built the fortune
Hankey's money comes mainly from lending to people that banks tend to turn away. He started in car retailing, and by the 1970s he had noticed that many customers at Los Angeles dealerships could not get a conventional loan. In 1975 he founded Westlake Financial Services to buy auto loans made to borrowers with low or limited credit scores. Westlake earns a higher interest rate than prime lenders in return for taking on more risk, and it built its own collection and servicing operations to manage that risk.
The business grew from a regional lender into one of the larger independent auto finance companies in the United States, working with thousands of dealers across the country. Westlake later added prime lending, dealer floor plan financing and loans for used cars sold online. Because the Hankey Group is privately owned and Hankey holds most of it, the profits of these lending units have accumulated in his hands over several decades.
The group has a habit of building the tools it needs in house and then selling them to others. Software, insurance and data businesses that began as support functions for Westlake now serve outside customers, and real estate investment adds a further stream of income that is less tied to the credit cycle.
Hankey has stayed closely involved in running the group well into his seventies and eighties, which is unusual for the founder of a lender of this size. Members of his family hold senior positions in several of the companies, and the group has preferred to finance its growth from its own earnings and from debt markets rather than by selling shares to outside investors. That choice has kept control firmly with the Hankey family.
Companies and holdings
The Hankey Group is a family of related businesses based in Los Angeles. Its best known parts include:
- Westlake Financial Services, the auto lender at the centre of the group
- Nowcom, a maker of software used by car dealers to manage sales and financing
- Knight Insurance Group, which provides insurance and surety products
- Hankey Investment Company, which owns and lends on commercial real estate
- Car dealerships in the Los Angeles area, the group's original line of business
Knight Specialty Insurance drew national attention in 2024 when it posted an appeal bond for Donald Trump in a New York civil fraud case. The group's real estate lending arm also finances large commercial properties. These activities show how far the group has moved beyond car loans while keeping lending as its common thread.
Early life and career
Donald Hankey was born in June 1943 and grew up around the car business in Southern California. His father owned a Ford dealership, and the younger Hankey learned the trade from the sales floor rather than from a corporate training programme. He later took over and expanded the family's dealership interests, which gave him first hand experience of how often sales fell through because buyers could not get approved for credit.
That observation became the basis of Westlake. Instead of passing on customers with damaged credit, Hankey decided to fund their loans himself and to collect on them carefully. The approach required patience and capital through several recessions, when defaults rise, but it allowed him to build a lending business that kept growing as the market for used car finance expanded across the country.
Over the decades Hankey also learned to treat downturns as buying opportunities. When credit tightened and competitors pulled back, Westlake was able to win dealer relationships and portfolios of loans that other lenders no longer wanted, which helped it come out of each cycle larger than before.
Philanthropy and public life
Hankey has kept a relatively low public profile for someone who controls a large financial group. He is known in Los Angeles business circles and has supported local charitable causes, but he does not run a large, widely publicised foundation, and details of his personal giving are mostly private.
His companies have occasionally faced regulatory scrutiny, which is common in subprime lending. Westlake reached a settlement with federal regulators in 2015 over debt collection practices. Hankey himself rarely gives interviews, and most public attention to him has come through his companies' deals rather than through his own statements.