Mid-Term Rental

Having launched its very-long-term offer – 60 month contracts in March, Arval is now deploying a medium-term lease offer to France, the UK, Spain and the Netherlands, with plans to roll out the offering to other territories on a country-by-country basis.

Arval’s new Mid-Term Rental solution covers contracts from one month to two years in length, and is designed to offer businesses seeking a flexible agreement a viable alternative. Arval believes the offering will be particularly popular with SME businesses, as Philippe Bismut, the organisation’s CEO, explains: 'The way work labour is organised is changing as more and more people are self employed, or employed on a contract basis, so we need to be able to address this emerging movement. We believe that with our SME proposition and Mid-Term proposition combined together, we can address this trend.'

'I think we are in a position where we can create new partnerships in the market by offering a new level of flexibility,” adds Philippe Noubel, deputy CEO of Arval. 'There is a grey area between three months and two years, so as you have noticed we have addressed that grey area with our proposal for one month to two years, which means that we intend to work in close partnership with the short term rental solution for the shorter part of the product.

'We have also expanded into the UK, The Netherlands, and Italy next year. So the idea is to provide cars for companies that need more specialist lengths for rental agreements.'

When pressed on the expected take-up for the new offering, Arval was understandably cautious, although Noubel suggested that leasing 10,000 cars in three years under the Mid-Term rental agreement would be a “good result” for the brand.

Telematics

Arval is also looking to increase its onboard telematics offering, with the aim of providing fleets with an up-to-the minute overview of driver activity and encourage employees to behave more responsibly on the road.

Following on from the Arval Smart Experience launched in France in 2013, which offers interactive multimedia tools and is currently being deployed in all group countries, telematics has become a strategic topic for Arval over the past two years. The company has invested in several of its international operations over recent years, using them as laboratories to test different telematics-based solutions.

'Our offering aims to, first of all, provide real-time information about the way the vehicle behaves or where it is located in order to provide short-term services, for example the need for an urgent repair or detecting automatically the location of the nearest suitable service point,' Mr Bismut explains.

'The second use is to monitor permanently the behaviour of the vehicle to find trends about the way it is used, and ways this behaviour could be improved to achieve best value for money and improve safety, and generally speaking, reduce the risk to the asset. We genuinely believe this is an opportunity for us to improve our service proposition for fleet managers.'

The telematics solution will be launched in all territories by the end of the year in a primary format that will include components such as anti-theft, real-time location and fuel consumption monitoring. The full service, including fleet report functionality, is expected to be operational within 18 months.

Driver solutions

Designed to help fleet managers cope with the increasingly diverse demands of their jobs, Arval’s Driver Solutions offers a catalogue of uniformly structured products and services in the form of packages, with the option to add additional services as required.

Now available in Arval’s main markets, Driver Solutions aims to take care of the day-to-day direct relationship with drivers, and offer fleet management solutions to help tackle administrative tasks and support the management of fleets in the field.

Each Arval subsidiary will devise its own packages according to the local needs of its customers, and basic standards will be monitored by the One Arval misison to maintain operational excellence: 'Arval is an organisation that is customer orientated, and by standardising solutions you can provide an offering that is simpler, cheaper, more efficient and higher quality,' Mr Noubel says.

New challenges

So, with a quarter of a century’s worth of experience now behind it, what’s next for Arval and are there any regions that have the potential to be the next operational centre?

'Organic growth in our existing geographies, for the foreseeable future, is our number one focus,' Mr Bismut explains. 'However, BRIC territories, particularly China, offer absolutely huge potential. Of course, there are new markets that we could consider entering and that is something we review regularly to make sure that the market has the potential, the maturity, and that we could manage it internally also. There also needs to be a used car market that is fluid enough to make this proposition viable.

'Those are the prerequisites for the full-service proposition to enter the market. We believe there are a few markets that combine this, for example in Latin America we could probably identify a few countries, and Latin America is probably the next new frontier for Arval.'