Fleetcor Technologies is a major company on the cutting edge of a payments-systems industry that is crucial to the continued functioning and expansion of the global economy. And one of the frontiers of that industry is electric-vehicle charging.
As actors from the federal government to state governments to automakers to utilities scramble to construct and extend EV-charging infrastructure that is crucial to the mainstreaming of EVs, Fleetcor stands ready to handle driver payments for kilowatts just as it handles many other forms of digital payments that lubricate the global economy. It’s just that there’s not truly significant demand yet.
“Payment systems will not be a hindrance for EVs,” Tom Panther, Fleetcor’s CFO, told me. “In the U.K. and the U.S., the payments industry has no issue connecting a person who owns an EV to a company that built a charging station and allows them to exchange money for kilowatt hours.
“That plumbing exists, it’s ubiquitous and it isn’t a hindrance to EVs taking off. The hindrance is, first, an infrastructure challenge that now has created consumer consumer-demand anxiety, and those two things are kind of self-fulfilling. Until the infrastructure challenge gets resolved, consumer anxiety will only be higher, and business anxiety about investing in EVs will only be higher.”
Fleetcor, he said, “will be ready for the evolution when and if it comes. Do we think all ICE vehicles will be replaced by charging? No, but we do think businesses and consumers will migrate to EVs as the technology improves.
But Fleeetcor has prepared for whatever the EV “revolution” brings. “We didn’t want to be late to the game,” Panther said, “so we [invested] to be able to build out capabilities that will be attractive to our customers. For instance, merchants who for years and years were gas stations are now new entrants into the EV market: charge-point operators. This is a playbook we’ve run before. We sit in the middle of an ecosystem to help them find each other through digital apps.”
Panther has been financial chief of the $3.8 billion company based in Atlanta since spring of 2023. “People have been moving capital and bartering since the beginning of time: grain, coins, then that evolved to cash and checks and ACH and different modalities,” he said. “Digital payment systems allow consumers and businesses to transact with one another and facilitate e-commerce. There will always be billions of something sloshing around.”
Fleetcor handles the “sloshing” through not only vehicle and mobility payments but also corporate payments and “lodging solutions” that include booking, managing and paying for workforce travel. The company operates in more than 150 countries, with international revenues comprising 39 percent; has more than 800,000 business clients, five million-plus consumer clients, and more than 4 million merchants and vendors; and operates 15 proprietary networks.
