By Mike Sheldrick
Trevose, PA-based CEI Group, a leader in accident management and driver safety, has been acquired by Toronto’s Element Fleet Management Corp.
CEI will continue to operate independently under the CEI name. It will also continue to be led by CEI’s founder, President and CEO, Wayne Smolda. Smolda will report to Jim Halliday, President and CEO of International Element Fleet Management.
An important part of the acquisition is that Element Fleet Management North America and CEI will remain separate entities. Says Smolda, “We’re going to operate as an independent, autonomous company under the CEI brand, reporting to Toronto.”
Additionally, CEI will absorb Element’s 100+ person accident management operations in Sparks, MD, which was a legacy activity of the Element’s acquisition of PHH Fleet Management in 2014.
“Everything will be rolled up into CEI, and the CEI brand survives. So, overnight, our company increases from 250 people to 350. We’re going to run balance sheets against each other and we’re going to take the best of both, and whatever they have that’s good that their customers like, we’re going to incorporate into the CEI platform.”
Smolda says the move will give CEI much greater capital resources to expand into new activities. “This,” says Smolda, “gives all the parties — CEI, Element and its customers, and CEI’s existing customers — much greater visibility into future CEI product and service developments.”
Smolda says CEI’s current FMC customers other than Element have welcomed the deal. “We’ve given them assurance that their interests will continue to be protected and they’ll be able to benefit from the expansion of our technology and solutions,” he says. “Everybody’s going to win. There will be no losers at all. Those same benefits that we create for any customer will be available to everyone.”
Among the current projects that will be accelerated as part of the new Element deal is the global fleet alliance program that CEI has formed with CEPA SafeDrive and VVCR International. Also on the drawing board are a cloud-based CRM system, a predictive analytics toolkit, and a Mobile Drivers App.
Smolda points out that CEI is serving more than 900,000 units and over a million drivers, because some units have more than one driver. But CEI is also looking at other areas where it can expand. Smolda says, “We intend to expand into insurance claims, the truck business and probably in serving government. There are 25 billion dollars in claims services versus maybe a billion in fleet. Insurance companies are looking at ways to process those claims more efficiently and more effectively with higher levels of customer satisfaction. And insurance companies may be interested in risk management. Canceling a driver’s policy may entail a cost to get a replacement policy holder, who may be just as bad as the one you canceled.”
Finally, he says that one future area where CEI is looking to enter is mobility. There will be a growth in mobility services versus fleets of one car for every possible driver. “We see the opportunity for our driver management tools. One thing that is constant is the driver.”
