Plastic fleet cards were once innovative. Today, mobile fleet cards give fleets a more flexible, secure, and efficient way to pay for fuel and other expenses.

Just as you can tap your phone to pay in your personal life, drivers can now make purchases with a fleet card stored in their mobile wallet. Paired with strong spending and fraud controls, mobile fleet cards mean employees no longer have to use personal accounts and make it easier to enforce policy. 

Before you make the switch, find out how mobile fleet cards work and what makes them a good choice for spend management.

The evolution of traditional fuel cards into digital fleet cards 

Traditional fuel cards helped organizations keep spending within policy, save on fuel, and reduced time spent on manual reimbursements. 

While a mobile fleet card still retains these benefits, going digital means drivers can keep moving even if they lose a card.

What is a mobile fleet card?

A mobile fleet card is a payment card that can be issued and managed digitally instead of relying only on plastic. Depending on the provider, the employee’s mobile fleet card may live in a digital wallet, a mobile app, or both. Organizations often use digital fleet cards to speed up issuance, gain more spend control, and improve the driver experience.

When deciding on a digital fleet card, the most important question to ask is whether the card is backed up by a strong fleet card program, such as:

  • Savings on fuel
  • A broad network 
  • Fraud protection
  • Strong spend controls
  • Coverage beyond fuel
Like the sound of these perks? Check out Motive Card.

How a mobile fleet card works

A mobile fleet card can either be used in addition to or replace a plastic card. The digital card can be added to a cardholder’s digital wallet, such as Apple, Google, or Samsung, so they can pay with a tap of their phone or watch at locations that accept those digital wallets. This gives drivers a faster, modern way to pay for fuel and other approved purchases while keeping card details more secure. 

Benefits of having a mobile fleet card in a driver’s digital wallet 

A mobile fleet card in a driver’s digital wallet gives any fleet-powered organization a faster, more secure alternative to plastic with built-in controls that make spend management easier to enforce. Key benefits include:

1. Faster operations with instant issuance

With physical cards, there’s always the risk of loss or theft. Replacing a plastic card requires waiting for production and shipping time. While drivers wait, they often use personal cards and submit reimbursements, adding work for back-office teams and slowing operations. When a new driver is onboarded, the team faces similar delays.

Mobile fleet cards can be issued instantly to drivers’ phones. This gets them onboarded or back on company cards faster, reducing card management overhead for fleet managers.

2. Less spend leak to personal cards

When employees switch to personal cards after losing a fleet card, purchases are not automatically regulated by your organization’s spending policies. It’s easier to go out of network or make non-authorized purchases, reducing the savings you’ve carefully counted on through your fleet card provider.

With a mobile card, drivers are less likely to shift spend to personal cards because their card is always on their phone. This helps maintain continual policy compliance. 

A card like the digital Motive Card is subject to all existing Motive Card controls and limits, and maintains real-time visibility into spend, locations, and card activity.

3. A better driver experience

Paying for fuel and other purchases on the go with a plastic fleet card means drivers always need to have the card on hand. When the driver forgets or loses the card, or has to enter multiple pieces of data to complete the transaction, transactions start eating into their driving time.  

A mobile fleet card reduces payment friction for drivers through fast, convenient tap-to-pay in stores, at pumps, and eligible online purchases. Drivers can focus more on driving and less on payment logistics.

4. Lower fraud risk

Plastic fleet cards are vulnerable to skimming, cloning, and physical theft. Even with robust fraud detection, it can be difficult to eliminate these risks completely.

Mobile fleet cards don’t carry these same risks. They may even come with stronger protections. For example, the digital Motive Card includes two-factor authentication to view card details, and gives fleet managers the ability to auto-deactivate the card based on unusual activity.

Try Motive’s mobile fleet card for efficient, secure, flexible payments

Motive Card’s new digital option makes managing payments even more convenient for fleet managers and drivers. Even if your team prefers physical cards, the benefits of Motive Card are broad — robust savings, fraud protection, and spending controls. 

Alex Amort, Vice President of Compliance for Cascade Environmental, put it this way: 

Because we’re able to manage our fleet and expenses in one dashboard, we have much closer control over our operations, can stop fraud before it happens, and can better coach our drivers on fueling policies and efficiency. With Motive, we’re able to obtain true, documented, direct savings to our bottom line.

Learn more about Motive Card or watch an on-demand demo of the Motive Integrated Operations Platform.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Mobile fleet cards support the same rules as physical fleet cards, including limits by amount, merchant category, number of transactions, and expiration date. With Motive, all the spend controls you have for physical cards apply to digital cards.

A mobile fleet card can be easier for drivers to use than a mobile payment app because it works through the wallet already on their phone, rather than requiring a separate app. That means less setup and less friction at checkout. The advantage increases when the card is backed up by a strong fleet card program with fleet-specific controls, reporting, and fraud protection.

Physical and mobile fleet cards share many security controls. However, mobile cards have a security advantage by reducing exposure to lost or skimmed plastic.

Yes. Many organizations use a mix of physical and digital fleet cards based on role and purchasing needs. Having a physical card option can still be useful, since not all employees may want to use their phone’s digital wallet or are comfortable with this technology.