Fleet FAQ? Fuel Management

Q. Do new players in consumer fuel payments represent a threat to WEX in the future?

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. For example, we’ve been able to use a device like the one designed by Square to help out some emergency fueling partners. You can imagine the scene: There is a hurricane coming in and you’ve got a number of mobile fueling trucks set up on the side of a parking lot and they want to make sure they know who’s getting fuel at that location. They’re going to need a way to capture that information. So now, with an iPad and a Square device, we’ve programmed it so that they can accept a WEX card. They’re going to swipe that WEX card in the vehicle and capture all that data. So it’s not necessarily a threat as much as an opportunity for us to integrate with them and potentially share customers. I think they’ve got the awareness of the market. A lot of what happens in the commercial space is being driven by consumer experience. So, people want to have that same customer experience. In some ways, it pushes us to develop different applications that are more consumer-like: mobile apps and ways to pay with a mobile device, etc.