
(Photo: Jon Stafford, SVP at ZETI)
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
January 22, 2025
The push to reduce emissions is pressuring fleets to adopt cleaner, more sustainable solutions. But making the shift toward electrification isn’t as simple as selling off ICE vehicles and buying a new fleet of EVs. Fleets must navigate the complex landscape of financing and accessing capital to make the shift to clean transportation quickly, smartly, and affordably.
Companies like ZETI work with fleets to find reliable automotive financing by connecting them with new pools of interested lenders. ZETI is accelerating the transition to cleaner transportation by creating a transparent marketplace where lenders can better assess risk and offer fleets affordable rates of investment. The company’s service is not only free for fleets to use but enables them to track and monitor their assets while paying off EVs as easily as paying a utility.
To better understand ZETI’s role as a conduit between fleets and lenders, we spoke with Jon Stafford, Senior Vice President of North American Sales at ZETI. With over 20 years of experience in fleet management, Stafford has a wealth of knowledge on how fleets can transition to cleaner transportation while avoiding hidden costs.
What is ZETI? What can it do for fleets?
At ZETI, our goal is to digitally transform automotive finance while accelerating the adoption of cleaner transportation. We aggregate data and leverage innovative technology to help fleets secure flexible and competitive financing while unlocking new or existing pools of capital. I think it’s important to say that we are not a fleet management company. We’re creating a marketplace for fleets with a funding need and matching them with capital sources looking to deploy capital.
As a bit of backstory, ZETI was founded in London in June 2020. We have about 4,500 vehicles on our platform, which are driven approximately 33 million miles while avoiding 12,000 tons of CO2 and 34 tons of NOX. I’m proud to say we closed our series A last summer with HYCAP Group having previously received investment from Toyota Ventures and Powerhouse Ventures.
How does ZETI help fleets convert to clean transportation?
The US is still in its early days when it comes to clean transportation. Being based in London, we can see that Europe and China are further ahead in the journey. With that being said, there are numerous applications today where a full-battery electric vehicle makes sense both in the total cost of ownership and in making a positive impact on the environment. In situations where a full-battery EV doesn’t meet the business application, we also support hybrid solutions or even new low-emission internal combustion engine vehicles. It’s amazing to see what the new technology can do with increasing miles per gallon. Plus, you get the double effect of removing older ICE vehicles from the road, which become less fuel-efficient as they age. We also support financing for infrastructure.
Essentially, our goal is threefold. The first is to provide access to affordable, available capital for fleets. The second is to help them monitor their assets in real-time. And the third is finding ways to save them money. For example, I see many fleets today that use their own cash equity or current line of credit with their bank to purchase expensive tranches of vehicles when it may be more beneficial to look for an asset securitization line or a lease. We’ve had a lot of success with fleets that are working with their current bank, then decide to engage ZETI to come in and meet with them. We have a digital platform that gives real-time transparency to your assets. This lowers some of the perceived risks for lenders since they can see where your assets are, where the utilization is, what some of the loan-to-values look like, and what the market value of the assets looks like.
We also automate multiple middle and back office tasks to lower the lender’s costs. Again, the ultimate goal for fleets is to lower the cost of funds for fleet operators, and we’re seeing it work today. Keep in mind that working with ZETI requires no cost from a fleet. For example, we had a lender last month that completed a second transaction for a fleet operator. Since the lender was able to lower some of the perceived risks around their assets and allow us to do some of their middle and back office work, they lowered the interest rate on that loan by 50 basis points.
What sorts of hidden costs are associated with financing cleaner transportation? How does ZETI help clients avoid those hidden costs?
I’ll start by saying I’ve had the privilege of working my entire career in the fleet industry, 20-plus years with leadership roles at two of the largest fleet management companies in the United States. One thing I would say is that it’s a complex industry. Unfortunately, one of the general issues fleets face is a lack of transparency. Ask anybody who’s put an RFP together and they can attest that getting apples to apples is a real challenge. I think this is because different banks, fleet companies, and sources each call things by a different name. As one example, they have different ways of using [terms such as] percentage or flat fee.
I can tell you that ZETI leads with integrity. What that means to us is full transparency from interest rates to invoices, and again, we don’t charge fleets to work with us. We’re paid by the lenders, so it’s in our best interest to get fleets the best available rates with the most flexibility.
Do you have a success story you can share?
I mentioned an example earlier where we’re starting to see lenders who’ve completed multiple transactions with us lower their interest rates for those fleets. Again, this is due to the investment transparency and efficiency they get from our platform.
We recently announced a partnership with Paragon Bank to fund about a million dollars of vehicles for Otto Car, a company that provides private hire cars to drivers offering ride-hailing services. In this transaction, we used our innovative proprietary pay-per-use financing solution. While that worked well for that application, we’re also happy to support traditional loans or leases.
Another example is when we supported Colt’s Cabs in acquiring $14 million of fully electric black cabs in London; financed by Gravis Capital, another lender partner in our network. Our goal is to share data with fleets to get them lower costs and more flexibility around their terms.
Is there a sweet spot in the types of fleets you work with?
When I came on board [ZETI] about a year and a half ago from one of the large FMCs, I was amazed to see the breadth of demand. You’d expect to see clean transportation and carbon regulation in states like California and New York, but you’re seeing more and more states adopt that legislation from the West Coast to DC to the Mid-Atlantic. We’re seeing incentives come not only from the federal level but from the state and local level as well. There are many great programs out there to engage with.
All of this came as a surprise to me. I thought I would see a lot of light-duty demand, but programs like Advanced Clean Fleets and Advanced Clean Trucks are driving a lot of growth in medium- and heavy-duty applications as well. The beautiful part of having a network of lenders is that we have lenders interested in all sorts of applications: light-duty, medium-duty, and car-sharing. Think of us as a matchmaking service where we match your specific asset need with a lender who’s looking to deploy capital in that space.