Fleetcor’s corporate B2B payments portfolio

Before Fleetcor starting getting into the world of corporate B2B Payments, their payment solutions primarily focused on cards, and specifically commercial spend categories, including fuel, lodging, tolls and general corporate payments, as well as gift card solutions (stored value cards and e-cards). Fleetcor grew primarily by acquisitions, completing over 80 acquisitions of companies and commercial account portfolios since 2002.

Fuel cards (46% of revenue) are charge cards that customers can distribute to vehicle drivers to purchase fuel and other transportation-related products and services and provides their biggest revenue source. But recently Fleetcor has turned their attention to corporate payments (18% of revenue). They believe that banks’ dominance of B2B cross-border payments, estimated at upwards of 95% transactions, has lots of room for Fintech plays.

Fleetcor has been on an acquisition spree to build up their corporate B2B Payments capabilities. Their B2B portfolio consists primarily of four companies:

• Fleetcor acquired Comdata and their virtual card issuance business in the USA back in 2014 for$3.45 billion and expanded more into AP corporate payments. Comdata’s focus continues to be US/Canada for corporate card programs, Travel Expense management and is one of the largest Mastercard issuers.
• Back in 2017, Fleetcor acquired Cambridge Global Payments, a leading B2B international payments provider for approximately $690 million. Cambridge has two lines of business — global cross-border payments and currency hedging solutions. The customer base is in the UK, Australia, US and Canada.
• In April 2019, they acquired NvoicePay, a provider of full accounts payable automation for businesses for approximately $208 million. Nvoicepay works with a number of P2P players and sits in the space of being a non-bank payment hub outsourcer which provides technology and managed services to its clients. It was founded in 2009 as a Cloud payment hub. You can read more detail in Spend Matters PRO.
• Subsequently in 2020, Fleetcor acquired AFEX for between $400 to $500 million. AFEX started in 1979 to become one of the world’s largest non-bank payment and risk management solution providers in the world. They offer AFEXDirect, a secure online platform that provides live exchange rates and full visibility of currency balances as well as incoming and outgoing payments as well as foreign currency risk management. Last year, AFEX handled $22 billion in payments in more than 100 currencies, while Cambridge handled $30 billion in more than 140 currencies.

From the businesses above, Comdata brings in around $500 million in revenue. It’s also the one hit hardest by the evolving Covid-19 pandemic and could continue to have an adverse impact on results of operations and liquidity. Steep declines in business travel, slowdowns in trucking, and lower fuel costs have been a hit to their base volume.

Future Roadmap

Today, there is little overlap in the business except around international payments. Nvoicepay provides international payments working with Cambridge Global Payments and have built integration with them via API’s to receive real-time FX rate feeds. Fleetcor also believes they can provide the Cambridge playbook to AFEX to manage risk. Cambridge and AFEX have different geographical focuses and both companies target small and medium-sized businesses, primarily in wholesale trade, manufacturing and retail.

Here are three areas to keep in focus with the company as it continues to ramp up its B2B corporate payment capability.

• Technology integration — Jason Busch and Michael Lamoureux did an excellent five-part PRO series exploring the five levels of M&A technology integration that vendors must go through when bringing together different companies and platforms. In Fleetcor’s case, it’s not apparent this will be a priority given the different nature of each corporate B2B payment proposition (i.e., virtual card solutions for invoice payments, corporate card programs, a fully outsourced accounts payable solution and cross-border payments through both AFEX and Cambridge).
• Risk management — The company writes derivatives, primarily foreign currency forward contracts, option contracts and swaps, with customers and derives a currency spread. Collateral management is an important part of managing counterparty risk. The company receives cash from customers as collateral for trade exposures and now with two major currency players, Fleetcor should — and I emphasize should — be able to develop better overall risk management capabilities.
  • This is not always easy to do, as both AFEX and Cambridge suffered significant losses with one Australian commodity trading client. The company recorded a $90.1 million provision for credit losses and write-off related to a customer receivable in their foreign currency trading business during the six months ended June 30, 2020.

• Cross-Sell — Fleetcor is looking at its latest acquisition, Roger, a global accounts payable (AP) cloud software platform for small businesses, to create cross-sell strategies to drive bill pay product adoption with Fleetcor’s existing 100,000+ customers that currently use other products. The platform helps SMBs gather and scan invoices and receipts, eliminate manual data entry using machine learning technology, approve and execute payments, setup automated workflows, and sync to accounting systems like QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct, Xero.

Today, Fleetcor’s corporate B2B payment businesses are mostly independent and independently run and operated. As the B2B corporate payment world continually evolves, Fleetcor hopes they can eat into the dominate position the banks have historically had.

They certainly have the borrowing capacity to make further acquisitions, given they have secured a $5.11 billion credit agreement with a lending syndicate that has a number of sub-credit facilities. As of June 2020, they had $3 billion in borrowings in one term loan facility, and another $338.9 million outstanding on another term loan, leaving borrowing capacity if they deem further acquisitions in the corporate B2B space.

David Gustin runs Global Business Intelligence, a research and advisory practice focused on the intersection of payments, trade finance, trade credit and working capital. He can be reached at dgustin (at) globalbanking.com.