Motive Picks Marqeta as Its Fleet Card Issuer

Fleet management platform Motive says it has picked Marqeta as its fleet card issuer.

Motive chose Marqeta due to its “ability to integrate fleet payments seamlessly” into the Motive platform where customers are already monitoring their fleet, the company said Wednesday (Oct. 18) in a news release provided to PYMNTS.

“We launched the Motive Card because our customers lacked 360-degree visibility across their fleet management and spend management providers,” said Hemant Banavar, Motive’s head of financial products.

“For the first time ever, safety, operations, and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet-related spend in a single system and benefit from cost-saving insights delivered through shared data.”

According to the release, that means reduced time spent on manual work, an easier time spotting fraud, enhanced productivity and less spending on fuel and maintenance.

With Marqeta’s embedded finance platform, finance teams can get more control of their fleet-related spending, along AI-powered tools to mitigate fraud and waste, and access to discounts on fuel, maintenance and other business expenses, the release said.

“We’re seeing the shift to embedded finance powering the future of fleet payments, meeting the needs of modern teams and workers through smarter payment tools,” Marqeta Chief Revenue Officer Todd Pollak said in the release.

The partnership is happening at a time when fleet and mobility companies are making strides in modernizing payments and leveraging working capital to expand, as PYMNTS wrote last month.

“That same prudent working capital management can help fleet companies grapple with the vagaries of unpredictable external forces, where macro headwinds or tailwinds present new, unforeseen opportunities and challenges that need to be addressed with speed,” that report said.

The 2023-2024 Growth Corporates Working Capital Index, a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence and Visa, found that this industry has shown the relatively highest deployment of working capital for growth purposes — a sign of investment in vehicles, back-office operations and improved systems to track the constantly evolving delivery/logistics landscape.

Looking closer, the data shows fleet/mobility companies using commercial cards, particularly virtual cards, more than other sectors, at 19%, compared to the 5% of the overall sample of industries, such as healthcare and marketplace companies.

In a recent interview with PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, Helen Jones, executive director of Visa Commercial Solutions Europe, noted that fleet and mobility “is the one the most active in terms of working capital,” adding that “card acceptance in this space is probably at an all-time high and just continues to grow.”