Wright Express to Develop Fleet Fueling Card for Mobil Oil

Wright Express has announced it will support and process a new proprietary commercial fleet fueling card for Mobil Oil Corp.

The card carries no fee for the first year and features volume rebates, detailed vehicle and driver analysis reports, electronic funds transfer, and electronic data interchange capability.

Corporate customers will be able to limit or ban purchases of certain products, receive consolidated billing with departmental breakouts, and obtain time-of-sale data such as odometer readings and drivers' identification.

The card, which will be rolled out in either November or December, can be used at about 8,000 Mobil retail outlets.

David Robertson, president of The Nilson Report, an Oxnard, Calif.-based industry newsletter, said proprietary and universal commercial cards are the only segment of the gas card market still growing. The others, he indicated, have been losing ground to cobranding.

"Mobil has as much experience as anybody in the card business, and they know how to market," said Mr. Robertson. "I'd say their chances of success (with this card) are pretty good. Wright Express has a lot of experience in providing the kind of back-end operations" that Mobil would need.

Fleet credit cards issued by third-party companies generated $2.36 billion in volume last year, according to The Nilson Report. Another $2.63 billion was attained through the fleet credit cards of gasoline and diesel marketers.

"Mobil is a strong brand, number one in the Northeast," said Michael Dubyak, Wright Express' senior vice president and general manager of merchant marketing. "It has the strongest penetration of card-activated terminals in the United States," with about half of its terminals equipped with this technology.

John Stipa, Mobil's commercial card manager, described card-activated terminals as "a tremendous benefit to our customers in terms of speed and convenience."

In recent years, fleet management services have grown beyond their initial emphasis on just fuel. Emboldened by growth in the market, executives are now looking to broaden product applications beyond fuel, the primary focus of their service, to relevant areas such as oil changes and car washes.

In March, Fleetman Inc. reached an agreement to purchase Gascard Inc., bringing together two fleet management companies serving a total of 8,000 outlets in 46 states. New Orleans-based Fleetman owns Fuelman, a system that emphasizes management controls and processing services for commercial, government, and utility fleets.

Gascard, based in Carlsbad, Calif., is both a licenser and transaction processor of a nationwide, card-activated fuel management system. The merged company's access still falls far short of Wright Express Universal Fleet Card, its chief competitor, which is honored at 90,000 fueling locations.

Wright Express, based in South Portland, Maine, is a subsidiary of Ideon Group Inc.

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