CFS News

Most strategy documents we've seen - from within the industry, or from external thinkers - describe the move from card-based to card-less refuelling as one of the "certainties" of the commercial fuel market's next-stage evolution.

Isn't it astonishing how many of us still talk about "the fuel cards market"? Many of the major downstream oil companies have “fuel card” divisions; private equity firms talk about investments in the “fuel card space”, and there is even a group on this app called “Fuel Card Connections” (you might even be reading this feature in that group thread…

You know, I was thinking back to those days when the most ambitious claim a fuel card issuer could make of its anti-fraud proposition was that its network was "fully online". I was trying to figure out just how long ago that was: Two decades? A decade? Five years? Last year?

Fuel retailers have fuel card programs: end of. They squabble about whether they are commercial businesses run as part of a b2b portfolio, or whether they're a core part of a fuel retailing business (they're both, which is kinda the problem). Sometimes, they even set them up as standalone financial services businesses, pretending they know how to…

Investors and research firms in the US are evidently somewhat perplexed: the expectation on both sides of the Atlantic was that the big beasts, Fleetcor and WEX, would storm into Europe and sweep all before them. Recent indications would suggest that if that's going to happen, it's going to happen far more slowly than we all expected. There are…

The fuel card world is outsourcing. Fact. The shareholders in Europe's biggest fuel retailers are unconvinced by the value of in-house fuel card schemes, and they are going to outsource to third party providers. End of.

Major fuel retailers are seemingly queuing up to outsource either fuel cards processing, sales and marketing, or indeed both. But will the next major to outsource be joining the ranks of the enlightened, or will they be the next lemming off the cliff?

CFS allegedly spoke hypothetically to a completely illusory former Cards Marketing Director…..

In a previous article, we looked at how the rapid growth of Eastern European transport is changing the competitive landscape in international road freight. Whether you take bilateral freight, carriage between third party countries, or cabotage – in every case the dominant forces are coming from the east of the continent.

Many ears will have pricked up at the news that Volkswagen Financial Services has taken a 51% stake in LogPay. It comes as no great surprise - but it marks another stake in the ground in a market whose structure is beginning to change dramatically.