Pictured: Steffen Schick
New mobility solution for a changing corporate market
Fleet Logistics has launched its first mobility solution, MobilityBUDGET, as it begins the transition from pure fleet management provider to offering new Managed Mobility Solutions to its clients and prospects.
MobilityBUDGET provides employees with a tax optimized cash amount which can be used to cover personal multi-modal mobility needs, ranging from personal lease, through shared mobility including rental cars to public transport.
Both web and app-based, it is intended to provide a clear, transparent and automated process to optimize internal cash allowance processes or simply offer an alternative to meet employees’ need for alternative mobility.
MobilityBUDGET is being rolled out in Germany from January 2021, and a second country is scheduled to follow in the second half of the year. The countries of priority are those in which governments provide benefits in terms of taxation but Fleet Logistics, which has a contract portfolio of around 180,000 vehicles in more than 27 countries, is ultimately aiming for Europe-wide availability.
CEO Steffen Schick explained the thinking behind the new solution. “The company car is no longer the most attractive option for every single user group, neither as source of mobility nor as benefit. This is why we are broadening the mobility options we are offering. In this context, it is important to us that we offer a high degree of flexibility to our clients by combining a growing choice of mobility services and turning them into simple, digital and cost-effective solutions. This is what we call Managed Mobility as a Service (MMaaS,) to differentiate it from Mobility as a Service (MaaS).”
“We have listened carefully to our customers and have created a solution, not to replace our core business, but to expand our service offering to ensure we are meeting all our customers’ needs,” he said.
Schick said Fleet Logistics had been holding ongoing discussions around environmental sustainability, with both customers and their employees searching for alternative solutions to traditional company car usage. “Reconciling the needs of employees with the objectives of employers, while maintaining a high level of flexibility, was another consideration,” he said.
Schick continued: “The entire process behind MobilityBUDGET is digital with a high portion of flexibility and worldwide freedom of mobility usage – which is an important consideration nowadays. The value-add for employers is twofold: first they can decide on how the tax benefit is split between the user and themselves, and second, they get a good view of users’ mobility needs and preferences. From an employer’s perspective, MobilityBUDGET is not only an attractive benefit to staff, but it also offers them valuable insights into the aggregated usage of mobility types by their staff,” he said.
Senior Product Manager Patrick Averweg added: “MobilityBUDGET applies to all employees regardless of the company car usage. The employer can implement this solution as an alternative or an addition to a company car, as salary compensation for new hires or for employees receiving a salary increase. It is an ideal solution for companies with several locations who very often cannot meet the differing local mobility eco-systems.”
Averweg went on: “We are offering the full suite of services ranging from the digital tool itself, through outsourced receipt checking to providing payroll files. We have designed this as a premium service so that it does not incur any incremental costs or make extra work for employers, while still being attractive to employees.”
“MobilityBUDGET is the first mobility product in our new family of mobility offerings which we will grow and develop over the coming months and years to meet the increasingly sophisticated mobility needs of our clients,” he said.
