Truck Fleets Save Costs and Gain Flexibility When They Upgrade to a Modernized Fuel Card Platform

In a Nutshell: Truck fleet owners and managers know that traditional fuel cards provide discounts within a network but often close the option to find a better outside price. An open-loop line of credit or prepaid card solution through AtoB brings fuel cost savings on a modernized fleet management platform. AtoB gives fleet managers real-time spend controls in a flexible environment that encourages finding the lowest price. Customers report a 10% reduction in total fuel costs and $3,000 saved per driver after switching to AtoB.

Fuel is generally a top-five — or higher — expense for small- and medium-sized truck fleets of the type we all see tooling around the roads and interstates. To pay for it, generations of drivers have used a fuel card, typically a charge card with a monthly balance due in full, or some form of prepaid card.

These traditional fuel cards are closed-loop cards, meaning drivers may spend only where the issuer has negotiated discounts and rebates. Although these conventional systems provided some protections and controls for generations of fleets and drivers, they make going out of network challenging at best.

That explains why, depending on routes and other circumstances, closed-loop systems provide limited to minimal choice for drivers to purchase fuel. There’s likely a better price out there somewhere.

What’s more, over-the-road drivers may have to go through a burdensome process on their current payments platform or use a different payment system to incorporate purchases for their rigs that aren’t fuel — such as tires, maintenance, and other products and services.

That creates issues in the field and back in operations, where your task is now to gather all your purchasing under one umbrella and somehow make sense of it. Controlling purchasing is difficult for SMB fleets on their best day. Distributing spend on two or more platforms makes the job that much more challenging.

A new fuel management platform provider, AtoB, set out five years ago to address those challenges after the founders went out into the field to speak with fleet owners, managers, and drivers about their biggest concerns. AtoB not only allows fleets to bring spend under one umbrella, it also provides a suite of tools to help companies manage cash flow and purchasing more rationally and efficiently.

“We spend a lot of time listening to customers tell us what’s important to them, and what we commonly hear is they need better insights in real time,” said Jeremiah Cooke, Head of Business Development at AtoB. “Our advantage is that we go beyond what they’re asking for to think about how we create technology that helps them do things they may not have thought possible.”

Fueling products and the credit and purchasing cards drivers used were always top-of-mind concerns when AtoB’s cofounders visited truck stops and fueling stations. The AtoB team dedicates itself to introducing the technological advancements the company’s co-founders learned drivers wanted and needed.

Cooke said a good example is AtoB’s integrations with trucking’s existing technology ecosystem. In the U.S., the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration mandates hours-of-service regulations most, if not all, fleets monitor through electronic logging devices (ELDs).

Many supplement ELDs with telematics devices to broadly track and transmit data about vehicles, drivers, and operations. Data may include vehicle location and driver behavior information; performance, efficiency, and maintenance metrics; and route optimization and asset utilization recommendations.

“We’ve done the back-end integrations into those systems to get data from those devices,” Cooke said. “Knowing things about each vehicle, like where it is and how much fuel it has, allows our platform to make autonomous decisions around transactions happening in real time.”

That means there’s no need for a fleet manager to look over everyone’s shoulder. Nor is there much need to monitor driver decision-making, given the granular spend controls AtoB provides.

The first thing users transitioning from piecemeal solutions will notice is that AtoB has brought a modernized experience to the fuel card industry. Typically, generating insights through those older solutions is nonintuitive. Having fingertip control over real-time data is a game changer.

“We can build controls into the technology platform of the business and give owners and managers ultimate peace of mind that the right things are happening even when they’re not paying attention,” Cooke said. “That’s something that we haven’t seen others in the space unlock and an excellent example of why we stand out.”

Digital transformation means AtoB views itself more broadly as a financial technology provider than a pure card issuer. A digital wallet, for example, helps fleets manage cash flow and driver payments on the platform.

“You can pay your people instantly out of our wallet,” Cooke said. “You could do it immediately after they haul a load. You could do it every day. That’s a huge benefit.”

Credit accessibility is an excellent option to have in fleet management for what it permits in cash flow management. AtoB card offerings center around whether a fleet can qualify for a line of credit or whether a prepaid option is more appropriate.

“It’s difficult for these companies to time their revenue and expenses to be perfectly correlated,” Cooke said. “When we’re working with folks, we’re really just trying to help them decide between credit and prepaid. The question is whether credit is the right answer for them.”

If it isn’t, AtoB can help. Clients who don’t qualify right away for credit can have AtoB report their purchasing transactions to Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion, the three major U.S. credit bureaus responsible for calculating credit scores.

“It not only helps them build history with us so that they can eventually work into a line of credit,” Cooke said. “We can also help them build general business credit for themselves. That’s part of the product customers really love.”

Behind the scenes, AtoB worked with Mastercard to transform traditional network-confined or closed-loop fuel cards into an open-loop system that lets users pay wherever merchants accept the Mastercard brand.

You get all of the things that you’d expect from controllability on a fuel card. But when you do need to buy that set of tires, it’s a much easier process that you can do all in one place.

That’s a big switch for fleet managers accustomed to running the business from spreadsheet dumps and PDFs. In that environment, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to understand what you need to control expenses.

“We’ve modernized that experience so you can go in and get the data you need through customized reporting,” Cooke said. “It’s all modernized and easy to use.”

Cooke said AtoB’s integrations with ELD and telematics providers also help cut down on fraud and abuse, including card skimming, which is more prevalent at truck stops than any other fuel station type. EMV technology made possible through the Mastercard partnership relegates previous-generation magnetic-stripe readers — still seen at many truck stops — tracking toward obsolescence from a security perspective.

For those who may worry about unlimited or fraudulent spending on these open-loop cards, AtoB provides controls down to the merchant category code level to limit purchase decision-making in real time.

“So if you want drivers to buy oil changes, you can do that,” Cooke said. “But if you don’t want drivers to buy oil changes, you can turn that on and off.”

Account managers may also quickly turn entire cards on and off and deploy new cards with a few clicks or taps. These protections help eliminate one of the hazards of previous systems when drivers terminate employment with unauthorized spending.

Meanwhile, out on the road, true to form with the past, AtoB’s Fuel Map shows drivers the fuel stops on AtoB’s discount network using proximity matching. However, the Fuel Map, part of AtoB’s app, also shows every other location where the driver can purchase fuel and encourages the lowest-price choice.

“Sometimes that’s not in our self-interest, but it’s in the proper interest of the customer,” Cooke said. “That’s an approach we’ve not found a lot of traditional players taking.”

The AtoB app will also plot the most fuel-efficient route over an entire haul. The AtoB team looks forward to continual refinement of the tools and to incorporating AI into purchase decision-making in the future.

The benefits, especially in an ultra-low-margin industry such as trucking, speak for themselves: an average 10% reduction in fuel cost and expense savings of $3,000 per driver among AtoB customers. The AtoB app emphasizes the value of saving actions at every step of the purchasing journey and across the reporting superstructure.

“For me, AtoB represents a modernization of technology in an antiquated industry,” Cooke said. “That’s the heart and soul of the company and what makes us so different.”