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...
Fuel cards help businesses fuel their vehicles, document and analyze those fuel purchases, and limit exposure to unauthorized purchases. Legacy payment types such as debit cards, credit cards and cash lack the ability to restrict purchases or report on what businesses are spending on fuel. A fleet card allows operators to manage those purchases by assessing the data collected from every purchase and using it to ensure organizational policies are being followed. This efficiency also frees up administrative resources for higher-level tasks.
A closed-loop fuel card uses a network that allows the user to control the type of merchant where the card can be used, the type of products the card can purchase, and what time of day, day of the week, dollar amount, and frequency the card can be used.
With open-loop products such as a traditional purchasing card, the bank or issuer may not own the entire chain. So you might have an issuing bank, someone else doing the processing for you, another institution doing the billing. A closed-loop network, such as the one featured by WEX, is a proprietary network. WEX releases specifications to the merchants that accept the WEX card. That means, in this example, that WEX is the issuer, the processor, does the billing, issues the credit, and basically owns the entire chain.
That allows the fleet card provider to control what data is captured and what to do with it. It’s a more secure network, because data is not being passed to anybody before it comes back to the customer.
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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