Being a fleet operator in today’s climate is hard – skyrocketing operating costs, exacerbated by volatile fuel prices, are only intensifying the economic pressure operators have been facing since 2020. The expectation is to achieve more with less—smaller budgets, fewer skilled workers and outdated tech has solidified a tough new norm for operators.
Moreover, the lack of technological innovation long-plaguing these industries means leaders are now using too many different systems to manage their day-to-day operations, and these require more manual overhead than available. Operators are facing a proliferation of unactionable data across all aspects of their business due to these siloed systems. Worse, this is allowing hidden cost centers, like fraudulent spending to quietly drain bottom lines.
To shed light on how pressing these issues are today, Motive surveyed 1,000 leaders across trucking and logistics, construction, oil and gas and more, to understand the depth of these challenges. Captured in the first-ever Physical Economy Outlook report, respondents revealed fragmented fleet and financial operations are core to their challenges.
Key insights:
- Rising costs are one of the biggest challenges that threatened businesses in 2023.
- 46% of leaders admitted to using more than 10 individual tools to manage their operations.
- One in three said they don’t have the visibility needed to effectively do their jobs.
- 44% of leaders believe that fraud is having a big financial impact on their business, but they don’t know how to detect it.
Embedded finance: Ushering in a new era of profitability by connecting fleet and spend
Embedded finance is increasingly being adopted across various industries to integrate financial services and products, such as expense management and credit cards, within non-financial platforms. However, it’s only recently that this type of integrated solution has become available for physical economy industries such as trucking, supply chain services, construction and agriculture.
This integrated approach erases the fragmented experiences of the past, giving operators complete control over their business in one platform. This eliminates the hassle of multiple logins or context switching and finally puts an end to the time-consuming task of manual reconciliations and matchbacks.
Even better, through the unification of data across fleet and spend, operators can proactively protect their profits through valuable insights that aid the detection of missed savings opportunities, and fraudulent and wasteful spend.
What was once a complex and siloed web of fleet operations and finances, is now simplified. From identifying untapped savings to flagging fraudulent transactions and unnecessary expenditures, this holistic view is transforming data into actionable intelligence, ushering in a new era of profitability.
Motive Card – an embedded spend management solution
Motive is the only platform that brings fleet and spend together in a single integrated platform streamlining financial operations, unlocking cost efficiencies and increasing savings. For example, Motive’s new Missed Savings feature will give Fleet Managers visibility into drivers spending wastefully on higher-priced fuel. They can uncover insights to coach their drivers, update spend profiles or even block specific merchants to prevent future missed savings. This feature is unique to Motive with shared data between fleet and spend providing a 360-degree view of driver routes, fuel prices and Motive Card partner rebates to enable this functionality.
Similarly, shared data across Motive’s platform also reveals hidden fraud by utilizing data such as GPS location, telematics and fleet card spend and has the potential to bolster profitability by up to 19%. Suspicious transaction alerts for mismatches in vehicle and spend location, or irregularities between fuel purchased and volume filled up help businesses detect fraudulent fuel transactions in near-real time, turning potential losses into profits.
Customers who use the Motive platform to manage both fleet and spend can realize real savings, for example, Hardy and Harper reduced fuel costs by 24%. Adam Stowers, Equipment Manager said, “Instead of simply monitoring our fuel spend, we can implement active measures to control it. Drivers also have to verify their identity with the Motive Driver App, which helps reduce fraud.”
Cascade Environmental has also observed benefits by adopting Motive’s all-in-one platform, with Alex Amort, VP of Compliance stating “The Motive Card showed that it has additional features and additional savings. So not only now does the card integrate with the app, we’re able to obtain true, documented, direct savings to the bottom line.” By adopting Motive, Cascade Environmental has saved over 800 hours monthly on IFTA reporting as a result of breaking down data silos.
Learn more about managing your spend using the Motive Card at gomotive.com/motive-card.