Linking The Fleet Card To The Tank

Rogue procurement and corporate spending can be a troubling issue for companies, but when fleet drivers are out on the road, it can be even more difficult than usual to track, manage and authorize purchases from a corporate office.

A new solution by Electronic Funds Source (EFS) wants to implement telematics and other sophisticated tools to provide fleet managers with greater control over employee spending and use of commercial cards.

An announcement made Tuesday (Oct. 6) said EFS is rolling out a new technology that integrates telematics and fleet card data to streamline authorization when drivers fuel up. The technology is being offered in the form of a new payment system, SecureFuel, according to reports.

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EFS will collect data through the payment system to analyze fuel spending habits and patterns and will have the capability to detect rogue purchases based on data sourced from a vehicle’s telematics, as well as information from the fleet card itself.

Altogether, SecureFuel means drivers can have their card transactions validated based on their location and fuel levels in their tanks. The service works at more than 14,000 truck stops, reports said.

“SecureFuel verifies the proximity of the vehicle to the merchant location before the fuel transaction is authorized,” said EFS President and Chief Executive Scott Phillips in a statement. “With SecureFuel, we can limit the fuel purchase to the available tank capacity and provide real-time alerts and exception reporting to our customers.”

The use of telematics — the ability of a fleet vehicle to obtain and send out troves of data – can save fleet operators billions of dollars every year, according to a recent report by FleetBeat. The fleet management industry is slated to be worth more than $30 billion by 2018, researchers found. Already, 12.6 percent of fleet vehicles in the U.S. and Canada are equipped with telematics units.

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