Q. How do you see the market for fuel card services evolving over the coming years in terms of partner programs?
A. I think you see most oil companies focus on what they’re good at...
A. We are in the electric space today. We’ve got acceptance at a number of charging stations, including ChargePoint. We continue to build out that network. We’ve got customers and partners who have electric vehicles and need to have charging facilities. We do business with the Federal Government and the Department of Energy is a customer of ours and we’ve got a huge push. The GSA (General Services Administration) also has got a huge push for EVs. A lot of the needs are related to the infrastructure: Where can you find these charging locations? What’s the charge time? What’s the battery life? I think our role is to allow people to get the charge reported back and settled. And we help companies establish where they should put charging stations, based on where we know our customers have EVs.
We’ve had conversations with these stakeholders, the same way we have had these with alternative fuels such as CNG (Compressed Natural Gas). The charging stations represent an interesting dilemma in that it’s probably not going to be your traditional gas station that will put a charging station and have vehicles there 30 minutes or an hour. It’s going to be somewhere else.
Is the value chain the same as in fuel?
The value chain is certainly different in that we’re not trying to find the best charging rates for fleets the way we would with fuel. Now it is just about getting the network set up.
That’s what our value proposition is today. Very much the way it was 30 years ago when we started WEX. First, we want to help vehicles get a charge and then we’ll try and optimize that experience.
Senior Vice President and General Manager
A. I think you see most oil companies focus on what they’re good at...
A. I think you will get both. It’s going to take a lot of time to change to just one solution...
A. I think down the road everybody probably assumes that we end up in a cardless society...
A. No, not necessarily. It may be more of a partnership opportunity as they start to get more involved in other aspects of the business...
A. Vehicles will always need to be fueled...
A. In these regions, a lot of what we do is following our customers. We are fortunate enough to have a database of more than 300,000 customers...
A. We’re getting it more from the customers. If I manage a fleet and I have a presence in 15 different countries, I have a global fleet manager that oversees it all...
A. Obviously, a partner will have more presence than an individual customer. A fleet is just one entity, whereas a fleet management partner might have 20 or 30 accounts in a given region...
A. We’re starting to see a lot of points of integration, whether that be with data or systems. Telematics devices provide a rich data set that can be utilized in a number of ways...
A. Fleet management was historically built on the foundation of data. The more data you had, and the more you could combine various data sources, the easier it was to gain insight into how your fleet is operating, allowing you to make better decisions...
A. The pace of change today is faster than it’s ever been, and yet slower than it ever will be from this point forward...
A. The single biggest mistake we see is to view parts of your fleet operation independent of each other...
A. There are many things, beyond the obvious, such as developing a written preparedness plan and training your employees to implement it so you protect your vehicles and equipment and identify which employees play essential roles during a disaster...
A. Arriving at work, Fran Fleetkeeper scans a large board with dots on a map. Some of the dots are green. Some are red...
A. Imagine waking up one day to no fuel, damaged roads, and unknown damage to your fleet of 500 vehicles. It’s the ultimate nightmare for a business with any exposure at all to mobility...
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