Guest Editor: Anna Grau, Director of Fleet & Mobility Solutions at Visa
The urgency of combating climate change is undeniably accelerating the shift towards sustainable transportation, one of the major contributors to global GHG emissions. The transition to electric vehicles is pivotal in this change and has led to one of the fastest-growing industries in the world. Consequently, the industry is rapidly adapting to keep up with the increasing demand. For instance, at Visa, the volume of payments for public charging has grown by 130% in the past year globally, showing no signs of slowing down.
Increasing regulations, including the EU ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, make the electrification of fleets in Europe over the next few years inevitable. Visa’s research shows that 81% of fleet managers have already implemented changes in their fleets, and 73% plan to fully transition to sustainable alternatives within the next five years.
As travel behaviour changes and technology advances, new mobility solutions are emerging.
Commuters are now demanding Mobility as a Service solutions, extending EV to other sustainable services towards door-to-door journeys. With businesses of over 250 employees now mandated to report travel-related emissions, more fleet companies are adopting these mobility solutions.
Payment preferences are evolving towards greater convenience and simplicity. On average, business and fleet drivers and employees hold 2.3 cards to manage their mobility. As multiple EV players offer various payment solutions, including proprietary cards, QR codes and dongles, this generates confusion for drivers and inefficiencies for businesses trying to track spending. Many operators feel that their current card isn’t meeting their business needs due to its inflexibility in purchasing, lack of consolidated reporting, and lack of a digital payment experience. Furthermore, these systems present complexities for drivers when it comes to interoperability, accessing public charging, cross-border travel, and vehicle rentals. Fleet managers have a new set of requirements, and closed-loop magnetic stripe cards are no longer sufficient to keep up with fleet needs.
With the recent announcement of payment requirements to install card payment terminals in chargers above 50kWh, across the TEN-T network in Europe, and above 8kWh in the UK, fleet companies need to ensure their payment solutions provide access to wider acceptance networks and address interoperability issues.
To support the demand and the needs of new drivers, Visa offers its advanced mobility card solution, Fleet 2.0.
This solution simplifies EV fleet driver’s life by providing a single card for all the necessary expenses, eliminating concerns about limited access to specific EV networks, restricted uses and purchases, cross-border operations, and the need to claim expenses back.
Visa offers fleet companies a convenient payment card option for their drivers to pay for their business purchases, providing flexibility to apply spend controls beyond EV charging, including tolls, parking and others. Fleet companies no longer have to worry about the current spend limitations for their drivers or the time inefficiencies linked to their payment experience or manual reimbursement claims.
More importantly, Visa Fleet 2.0 aims to save time and effort for fleet managers by providing new insights and information enhanced in the transaction message directly to businesses in a consolidated way, such as each driver’s spend, mileage, charging time, plugging-in time, ID vehicle, VAT, and much more. At Visa, we simplify tracking and managing expenses on the road by removing financial planning challenges and reducing fraud through the most reliable and secure payment protocols.
