Fleet operators have a crucial role in the global logistics supply chain – managing the movement of goods and services to enable businesses to prosper and consumers to receive their goods on time. Innovation can be essential in helping fleet organizations save time and resources, yet legacy fleet payments have not always addressed major industry pain points, which can demand modern technology solutions enabled by seamless and secure digital transactions.
Challenges the industry faces include fraud caused by persistent use of mag stripe-only cards, failure to utilize new technologies such as tokenization and digital wallet capabilities, opaque pricing and antiquated platforms with outdated user interfaces. Today’s fleet management processes are often still manual, and lack easily deployed controls that can make it difficult to prevent fraud. To put this into perspective, if only three percent of fleet card spend was unauthorized, this would add up to more than two billion of additional costs for U.S. businesses.
Visa works directly with the issuers of fleet cards, whether they are large financial institutions or smaller fintechs. Visa’s Nareg Guregian, director of B2B Fleet Partnerships, reflects on the exciting opportunities to innovate in fleet management and how Visa is positioning customers to thrive in this ecosystem.
What are Visa’s new capabilities for fleet card tokenization and digital wallets?
Nareg Guregian: We are very excited about new enhancements to our fleet cards, such as introducing tokenization and provisioning for mobile transactions. This enables issuers and fintechs to integrate encrypted and tokenized card information into Apple Pay mobile wallets, providing a seamless and secure experience for commercial fleet drivers and fleet managers. We are also working with other digital wallet providers and have some exciting momentum in the pipeline.
An innovative feature of this enhancement is the ability to provide fleet data tags through a default configuration set up by the issuer, fintech or processor. This means that fleet data tags, which were previously tied only to the plastic card chip, can now be dynamically provided during the token provisioning process. Once the token is loaded into the mobile wallet, Visa's contactless specification allows for token payment data and the fleet data tags to be passed to the point of sale.
Visa's tokenization capabilities address the pain points of the current manual, and sometimes inconsistent, end-user experience. This enables digital credentials to be pushed into mobile wallets, card-on-file merchants and Click to Pay. This digital experience can reduce the time to issue a card from seven to 14 days with a physical card to just a matter of hours for a push to a digital wallet.
How is this a more holistic technical approach compared to other industry offerings?
Guregian: Our goal is to better position issuers and merchants in the changing landscape of employee mobility. With EMV at fuel pumps in the U.S, the growing traction of electric vehicle fleets, and fintech enhancements to fleet management software, Visa has introduced significant enhancements to the Visa Fleet product platform. Visa provides commercial clients with more granular product category level controls, more enhanced data and the ability to receive enhanced data faster for real-time business decisions.
Our enhanced data program helps our issuer partners create fleet products that address many of the existing pain points for their business customers. As a result, Visa fleet cards enable businesses to make confident fleet-related purchases within Visa’s leading merchant network.
This confidence is based on product capabilities, such as enhanced data gathering, expanded authorization controls, extended transaction reporting and an integrated product with streamlined billing. Visa Fleet provides fleet operators with a chip-based solution that offers enhanced controls, data and reporting to enable fleet operators to better track and manage fleet purchases.
