Belgium-based Sofico first opened an Australian office in Sydney in 2002 in response to demand from a growing Australian fleet and leasing market. Today, the company’s systems manage over 250,000 cars in Australia and New Zealand via a variety of fleet management and leasing companies.

HRH Prince Philippe is currently visiting Australia and New Zealand presiding over a trade delegation to stimulate Belgian export and to provide a framework for networking between companies in Belgium and Australia and New Zealand.

‘The combination of our success in Australia and the fact that we are celebrating our tenth anniversary this year was an ideal opportunity to invite HRH Prince Philippe and the delegation to be part of our official celebrations.

‘We are honoured that His Royal Highness accepted our invitation to celebrate our tenth anniversary together with us.’ said Koenraad Van Grimbergen, general manager at Sofico Services Australia.

Sofico first started trading in Australia almost 20 years ago with software implementations for Australian leasing and fleet management companies managed from the Belgian head office.

But it was in 2002 that the company took the strategic decision to open an Australian office to better support local fleet customers and to provide a springboard to further expansion in the region.

Koenraad Van Grimbergen added: ‘Since the opening of our Australian office, we have continued to expand in the Australian and New Zealand leasing and fleet management markets. Today we work with leading companies, both captive and non-captive, and are considered the market leader in the fleet software sector.

‘We continue to strengthen our position and have a number of new customer implementations under way,’ he said.

In the last five years the company has doubled its turnover in Australia/New Zealand and last year turned over more than A$ 6.7m.

As a result of its success in Australia, Sofico has made further investment in the Asia -Pacific region and in March this year opened an office in Tokyo, Japan with the intention of extending its customer base in new countries in the region.

In the last decade, Sofico has seen a number of changes, both structural and procedural, in the Australian fleet market, including increased consolidation amongst major fleet management organisations.

As with the UK, salary sacrifice, or salary packaging as it is known in Australia, has seen significant growth in recent years. Salary packaging means that dealings are at an individual driver level with products that are highly flexible for the employee but still simple for the employer to administer.

This has led to the rise of specialty salary packaging companies, but these companies have also been encroaching into the more traditional fleet management and operating lease markets.

This has forced many of the existing fleet management organisations (FMO) to create more flexible offerings to stay competitive, with the result that fleet leasing products are now far more modular that they were in the past, with lessees given the opportunity to "mix and match" product components as they see fit.

‘There is a much wider range of product components and pricing mechanisms available to Australian lessees than there has ever been before,’ said Koenraad Van Grimbergen.

Another area that has seen considerable change is that of fleet technology, with some interesting trends developing.

In line with the growth in salary packaging, there has been an increased demand for drivers to have increased access to vehicle reporting to gain an accurate picture of their vehicle’s performance.

At the same time, web access to in-house systems is a prerequisite for any FMO to be successful, and on-line quoting and reporting is being demanded by most large lessees.

‘In the area of reporting, it is no longer acceptable to simply provide the data. Lessees require comprehensive, analysed reporting, especially in a ‘dashboard’ style,’ said Van Grimbergen.

‘This approach to reporting means that there has been a much greater requirement for integration with industry suppliers. FMO's are expected to gather data on fuel providers, toll-ways, insurers and various other suppliers and integrate all this into a simple but comprehensive report for their customers.

‘In a crowded, mature market, where the only way to grow is by capturing market share, every FMO knows that if they don't provide this, their competitors will,’ he said.

FMOs were looking for a number of features and benefits from their software supplier, said Van Grimbergen.

‘They want an end-to-end solution to increase efficiency and reduce costs. They insist on a self-sufficient platform to autonomously continue to adapt the software to  meet rapid market changes, they want  a reliable, stable and local software provider who is close to the market and  one which provides effective, flexible  and timely solutions.

‘At the same time, they want as short as implementation time-frame as possible, using out of the box best practice solutions.  Being capable of providing all of these characteristics through our Miles software solution has been just one of the secrets behind our success,’ he concluded.