Interview with Michele Cunningham, Senior Vice President, Strategic Development, Element Fleet Management
Tell us about the transition from PHH to Element Fleet Management.
There’s a lot of excitement and great action going on within the transition. We are focused on successfully migrating customers onto the legacy PHH platform. We are taking the “transition and then transform” approach because our customer success is the most critical factor. We are noting lots of exciting opportunities to extend products and services and take a best of the best approach in creating Element Fleet Management out of these composite companies and really bringing our customers something special. Also, we want to bring our clients very compelling value in terms of North American fleet management along with our global alliance.
One of the great things about the transition is bringing together the excellent management team of all of the companies that now make up Element Fleet Management – led certainly by my boss, Jim Halliday, who is the President for Fleet Management in North America. We have created a strong and unified North American leadership team.
What kinds of concerns have your customers expressed and how are you responding to them?
I think with any change comes concern. Our customers are concerned about the way a new bill might look or maybe a feature in their online portal is going to be a little bit different. We’re working very closely with each of those customers and being very clear to them about what is different, what is new, what great advantages they are going to have moving forward, and how we are committed to resolving any inevitable hiccups. I think that in any customer relationship the path is never perfectly smooth, but I believe the character of a partner is how they resolve issues along the way and we’re committed to doing that.
We have been focusing initially on migrating customers, but we’ve also been taking time to understand the current products and services and capabilities of each of the companies, including Transport Action, GE Fleet in Canada and of course PHH in the U.S. and Canada. We are using this integration as a catalyst to pull together the best of the best.
The integration gives us the opportunity to extend capabilities to bring new services to customers. We are particularly excited about the ability to bring new asset classes and funding structures to our customers. We have the benefit of our sister verticals within Element Financial, including railcar, aviation and commercial, and vendor finance. We are already finding customers that we have in common. This opens up opportunities to introduce our customers to a broader array of Element Financial programs and services that help them become more productive and profitable. We’re excited by this and hope our customers are as well.
Let’s talk about Element Financial; what you have found to be most attractive and exciting about the company?
Element Financial was founded in 2007 and is a relative newcomer in terms of a brand to the marketplace. But the players and the principals at Element Financial are seasoned professionals and we have a great depth of talent who know how to creatively solve financing problems and bring solutions to customers, whether those structures are closed end, open end, fair market value, etc. The creativity and the theme of making capital work is very exciting for us. We’ll be able to combine a strong financing capability with the products and services that our fleet customers have come to expect and that is a winning combination.
This is definitely going to expand your reach in Canada.
Undoubtedly our reach in Canada is going to expand. With the combination of Transport Action, GE Capital Canada and PHH Canada, we have literally doubled the size of what either Element or PHH was before that. The Canadian marketplace is now a much more substantial portion of our business. As much as we used to think of ourselves as North American leaders, the acquisition has put us in a fantastic position to cement our position as the premier North American fleet management provider.
How will the transition affect the Global Alliance?
One of the things that won’t change with the integration is our commitment to provide our multi-national companies with global solutions. What was the PHH Arval Global Alliance is now the Element-Arval Global Alliance. All of the partners – including Arval, our founding partner, and SG Fleet in Australia and New Zealand, and Avis Fleet Services in South Africa, provide a winning combination. The Global Alliance is a true relationship and collaboration. The partners meet several times a year in person and we’re constantly learning from one another, which allows us to become better not only as a group but within our own markets. Element’s commitment to global is very strong and we’re excited about taking the Global Alliance to the next level.
Aside from the transition, what are the unique issues that clients are concerned with now?
For our clients, cost management and fleet optimization continue to pose challenges. Everyone is looking to do more with less, so I think that is a perennial issue within the fleet management industry. One of the things that we are also seeing now is data overload, particularly as the use of telematics continues to gain traction and generates a great deal more information on drivers and vehicles. We have transaction data, telematics data, customer provided data, and other third party data coming in — meaning our customers look to us to help them make sense of all this information. They are not looking for reports and analytics – they are looking for insights. They are looking for exceptions and what they need to do differently. The next challenge we have in this industry is taking all of that data from all of the available sources and turning it into something that companies can use for competitive advantage. At Element, we feel we’re leading the way in the proprietary tools and strategic consulting capabilities to do this for our clients.
