Techies put a cap on fuel fraud for fleet owners

It sounds like a juvenile joke: What do the UN, BMW, Standard Bank and Shell have in common? The answer is a lot more serious. These are all early adopters of a fuel management system started by two techies frustrated with outdated technology used by large organisations for fuel payments.

Shadab Rahil and Nolan Daniel had been working for a major fuel company for a decade to implement payment systems. They were convinced there must be something better, but couldn’t find it on the market.

“So we decided to build it,” says Rahil, now jointCEO with his co-founder of a start-up called Payment24.

Until now, he says, there have been a couple of standard solutions: “A fuel card provided by banks, which is a piece of plastic with no verification, and can be cloned; and the nozzle-and-tank system, where a proprietary attachment on the fuel pump nozzle links to a ring on the tank, and in turn connects to a fuel management system. It’s an expensive solution, it’s difficult to maintain, and there is room for offline fraud.”

These technologies, says Rahil, are at “end of life”. The road map of electric and connected vehicles, among others, was not being catered for in this “dinosaur system”.

“We kept waiting for someone to do something about it, and eventually decided to do it ourselves, focusing on cloud, mobile technology, the internet of things, and contact technology. All of it was commercially available.

“We were able to design something from scratch that meets the needs of the market, and which could be used to target segments of the market.”

Low-cost sensors, including a probe inside the petrol tank, bring a major new feature to fuel management.

Rather than vehicle tracking, Payment24 offers fuel tracking. In an industry in which fuel siphoning is a major problem, this changes the landscape.

“We’ve connected both sides of the ecosystem, so that companies can make payments and also track their fuel. We verify that it went into the tank and remained in the tank on the journey.

Some companies spend 30% of total revenue on fuel, and half of that is often lost due to mismanagement, fraud, siphoning, and selling fuel out of a vehicle.”

The system keeps track of how much was dispensed via the pump, a sensor picks up whether it all went into the tank, and the fleet owner is alerted if there is a discrepancy between how much should have been in the tank before and after.

“Petrol is like liquid gold, and the vehicle is like a safety deposit box on wheels,” says Rahil.

“On average, 950l of fuel goes into a big truck, typically into two tanks, at a cost of more than R70,000 to fill a single truck. Our system allows the customer to monitor petrol use with 98% accuracy.”

The product meets a growing need globally. As a result, Payment24 has expanded to Europe and the US. The next target: the rest of Africa

Says Daniel: “There’s going to be a lot of growth in Africa in the next 10 years, and our solution will be big, because mobile is so pervasive.”

Petrol is like liquid gold and the vehicle is like a safety deposit box on wheels