FLEETCOR has acquired cloud-based electric vehicle (EV) charging software platform Mina.
The global business payments and spend management company said in a Wednesday (Feb. 1) press release that the purchase gives it a solution for commercial fleets in the United Kingdom that captures, calculates and pays for at-home charging of business-use vehicles.
“It’s a fascinating company that’s built software integrations into virtually all the U.K. EV charging hardware suppliers and electric utility providers,” FLEETCOR Chairman and CEO Ron Clarke said in the release. “That makes at-home EV charging and reimbursement incredibly simple for employees and employers.”
Adding EVs to commercial fleets creates some new challenges beyond those that businesses face with internal combustion engine vehicles, FLEETCOR President of Fuelman and North America Local Fleet Keagan Russo told PYMNTS in an interview posted in January 2022.
One of those issues is reimbursing employees who charge company vehicles at home. That requires getting charge data, calculating the expense of charging the vehicle at home and reimbursing the employee, Russo said at the time.
People may not have anticipated the amount of recharging of business vehicles that would happen at employees’ homes, Clarke said in February 2022 during a FLEETCOR earnings call.
Because this charging is happening away from public recharging stations, it has created opportunities for software companies to help businesses see that it is measured and reimbursed.
Mina’s solution simplifies and automates this reimbursement process, thereby helping commercial fleets manage the transition to electric fleets, according to the press release.
FLEETCOR first invested Mina in 2021, saying at the time that Mina’s solution makes paying for EV charging accurate and easy for employers and employees, that clients are supportive of paying a software subscription fee for that simplicity and that the investment supported FLEETCOR’s plan to support clients’ recharging and refueling, at-home and on the road.
With the acquisition, Mina joins the FLEETCOR portfolio of brands that automate, secure, digitize and manage business payments in more than 100 countries, the release said.
“We now have a market-leading 3-in-1 EV charging solution for commercial fleets that combines at-home, on-the-road, along with internal combustion engine refueling into one integrated client offering,” FLEETCOR Global Managing Director of EV Solutions Tom Rowlands said in the release.
The U.S. Treasury Secretary says a new government cost-cutting effort has found $50 billion in savings.
Speaking to Fox News Tuesday (Feb. 18) evening, Scott Bessent said the work by the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE), a group created by executive order last month, could ultimately lead to “several percent of GDP that we are saving.”
The secretary added that the public doesn’t “have to be concerned about any of this,” in reference to attempts by the Elon Musk-connected team to access taxpayer data, leading Democratic lawmakers to raise concerns about privacy.
At the Internal Revenue Service, Bessent said, there’s one member of the DOGE team “looking at an outdated IT system, that’s all they’re doing.”
Bessent said two people at Treasury had “read only access” to the payments systems, meaning they don’t have the ability to make any changes. “There are very strict guardrails around them,” he said.
The $50 billion figure is slightly lower than the $55 billion in savings DOGE claims to have found so far. However, a report from Bloomberg News Wednesday (Feb. 19) notes that while DOGE says it has saved $55 billion, its website accounts for just $16.6 billion.
That site also includes an error, the report added, mislabeling an $8 million contract as $8 billion, reducing the amount of the group’s itemized savings by nearly half.
DOGE’s efforts have helped bring about hundreds of thousands of government layoffs, some of which have been rescinded as departments realized they were missing crucial workers.
For example, the mass firings led to the dismissal of a team in the U.S. Department of Agriculture working on the government’s response to the avian flu. The department has said it is now trying to reverse the firings.
In another incident last week, the National Nuclear Security Administration rescinded firings for employees responsible for monitoring the nation’s nuclear stockpile, only to discover it had no way of getting in touch with said employees.
The idea for DOGE was first floated last year, with President Donald Trump announcing that Musk would lead the project. However, the administration has since said that Musk was an advisor to the White House, and not in charge of the department.
In a recent interview with PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster, Amias Gerety, a Treasury official for the Obama administration, warned of the consequences if DOGE’s efforts to access payment systems created uncertainty.
“If there’s one phrase that dominates discussions about the Treasury’s role in the nation’s finances, it’s ‘full faith and credit,’” Gerety said.
“The full faith and credit of the U.S. government should not be impeached. It’s literally in the [Constitution]. If you’re a bank, if you’re an investor, if you’re a government contractor, if you’re a retiree receiving Social Security — you have to ask, will my payments go through? That uncertainty should be felt around the world.”