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. Established in 1983, we are an industry leader known for developing technology that pioneered the closed-loop, proprietary fuel card network.
Many of our competitors offer open-loop products, such as a traditional purchasing card -- like a MasterCard, a VISA -- where the bank 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. Whereas -- in the WEX world, on the fuel card side -- it’s a closed-loop network, which means it’s a proprietary network. We release specifications to the merchants that accept our card. That means we control the data. We are the issuer, the processor, we do the billing, we issue the credit, etc. We own the entire chain.
What that allows us to do is to control what data we capture, and what to do with it. It allows us to have a more secure network, because we’re not passing data to anybody else waiting for it to come back.
So that’s what fleets really have come to appreciate over the years.
One of our other lines of business is our Virtual business. We started that back in 2000. Very different from our competitors -- who are owned by a bank, or who use a bank. We own a bank. So we issue, through our bank, a MasterCard. Most of the issuance is done by our Virtual business. And we would routinely look at that and say: “Is that an opportunity for us to look at the fleet business and maybe migrate there?” Our customers and partners, still to this day, will tell us that the value in that closed-loop network is worth keeping.
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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