CEO Debate : Mobilty Management will replace Fleet Management
The highlight of the Fleet Europe Forum sessions on the 6th of December was the debate with five mayor players in the leasing industry.
Fleet Europe asked Bart Beckers, CCO of Arval, Berno Kleinherenbrink, SVP Commercial of LeasePlan Corporation, Tim Albertsen, Group Deputy CEO of ALD International, Richard Schooling, CCO of Alphabet International and Peter Derks, CCO of Athlon International to give their comments on the challenges that leasing companies face today.
The participants all indicated that the switch from fleet to mobility management has been made, and that globalization is a fact, driven by customer demand. A resume of the interesting answers given during the debate.
Peter Derks (Athlon): “The Daimler group wants a global presence, and Athlon is a part of it. We have strong partnerships and will hop on the expansion train into other continents in the future. We will expand into other countries, such as China. As for what the evolution of mobility is concerned, things are going at a very high pace. The future is already here and new services and products develop much quicker than in the past.”
Tim Albertsen (ALD): “Scale is important in our business. It provides us with scale benefits and the capacity to invest, but on top of that globalisation helps our industry to develop faster. Fleet management is becoming ever more global, it is clear that globalisation is bringing benefits for our clients and gives us a good opportunity to explore new markets. Europe is certainly not losing its leading role in fleet management, and our penetration in new regions will allow us to explore new possiblities in mobility services.”
“We also launch an integrated fleet management platform because we listen to our customers. It is perfectly complementary to the other ones, and we understand the need of our customers to have a multi-supplier platform. The data is anonymised, of course, as is the case with our competitors. The clients will benefit from the best tools.”
Berno Kleinherenbrink (LeasePlan): “While we did not go ahead with the expansion towards Malaysia, we are still willing to expand into new markets, worldwide. For us, it is important that we follow our clients to where they need us.” “Moving from B2B to B2E and B2C presents us with challenges. We recently launched our biggest media campaign ever, but B2C is still less than 10% of our total figure and might be more important in the future, but clearly our B2B customers (larger corporations and SME) remain our main customers. Technology will enable and allow us to give our customers a better understanding of our products, and also to combine various ways of transportation, other than the car alone. Technology makes things possible. It enables us to enter into new markets, alone or with partners.”
Bart Beckers (Arval): “We are operating on a global scale. We opened a new subsidiary in Norway a few weeks ago, at the request of one of our biggest customers, and we are ready to tackle future challenges using the right partnerships. We can learn a lot from partners in different parts of the world. The challenge for our industry is to adapt. It requires big investments and industrializing things. Our new integrated fleet management platform for our customers allows the integration of assets leased by other leasing providers, and today at least two of our largest competitors have customers that manage their fleet with the programme we provided.”
Richard Schooling (Alphabet): “We at Alphabet also want to follow our customers. We are strong in Europe, we are present in China also and look into other territories. To have a mature solution in a market where you were not yet present is a difficult thing if you don’t have solid partnerships. Luckily, we have those. We are not present in the US as of yet, but we are looking at that region, as well as Asia. We are mobility business providers, trying to respond to the customers’ needs through harmonization and standardization. We must use new initiatives and technologies and create solutions to add quality to our services.”
As a conclusion, the participants all agreed that today, managing a fleet of cars and providing these cars to individual drivers is not enough, the leasing companies all use new technologies and partnerships with start-ups and reputed players to transform their traditional fleet management business towards a mobility management-business, going further than the classical company car.
