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Multi Service. Innovation Where it Matters.
Today we are proud to launch our “refreshed” corporate brand. It is one, I think, that remains true to the legacy of our company, but also communicates our vision for the future – our belief that many important innovations happen outside the mainstream. Because, when it comes down to it, the payments industry is not all that different from other business sectors in the global economy. Payments products and services are typically designed for the masses.
This mindset, though, can create a new problem: a lull in innovation. Companies that only solve problems for the masses are not able to be responsive to important ideas that initiate within niche business challenges. In thirty years of business very few of our clients have come to us for help with a general “payments problem.” More often, they’ve come to us with a specific business problem – some manual process that is inhibiting cost control, business management or growth.
In the late 1970s, for example, when fleet managers received monthly bills from their credit card companies, each transaction would have to be manually attributed to the appropriate truck and driver. Management would then have to utilize driver logs to decide whether or not a driver appeared to be fueling too frequently (potentially stealing fuel from their companies).
Multi Service was founded on the idea one fleet owner had to automate this process, and the first live electronic authorization at a truck stop occurred in 1981, requiring a truck’s hubodometer reading at every transaction, which automatically identified and eliminated fuel theft.
In the thirty years following, Multi Service has continued this tradition:
- developing aviation fuel card capabilities that the U.S. Government and other governments would later adopt to centralize aviation fuel transaction data and negotiate pricing with high-volume merchants,
- designing a web-based marine fuel procurement tool to provide marine vessels with access to competitive fuel bidding for ad hoc purchases, and
- establishing closed-loop merchant networks to satisfy the billing needs, credit requirements, or data management requests for clients in the trucking, petroleum, marine, retail and other commercial industries.
All payment industry solutions, all designed with a business problem rather than a payment problem in mind.
Over the past three decades, we’ve learned that there is no shortage of payment problems to be solved. It’s just that oftentimes, these businesses don’t relate to the idea of a payments problem. They identify with a business problem, automation problem – an innovation problem.
Multi Service. Innovation Where it Matters.
