Innovation Insider with Skipr with Mathieu De Lophem, CEO of Skipr & Tim Albertsen, CEO at ALD | A single tool to manage mobility 🚀🚗

Client-centricity, operational excellence and sustainability are the three pillars to our innovation strategy at Societe Generale. All three came to the fore when ALD Automotive, the listed vehicle leasing and fleet management business majority owned by the Group, announced in September its investment in the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) company skipr. 

It’s an important step in ALD’s ambitious five-year Move 2025 strategic plan, by which CEO Tim Albertsen aims to transform the company into a fully integrated sustainable mobility provider and a global leader in its field. A key objective in delivering this strategy, unveiled in November 2020, was to invest in its digital capabilities.

Investing in Skipr is a perfect example of how fintechs allow the Group to innovate: demonstrating how technology, partnerships and industry expertise can come together to deliver a better outcome for our clients. While ALD’s investment is still only a few months old, I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak to Tim and Mathieu de Lophem, skipr’s CEO, about cooperation, synergies and some very exciting growth plans.

Mathieu, tell us what skipr does?

Skipr provides a single tool for companies and their employees to manage mobility so it’s flexible and sustainable. Mobility is a huge source of companies’ CO2 emissions, so they are looking for alternatives to reduce the monetary and environmental cost for employees to come to the office, to attend meetings and so on.

We provide employees with a payment card solely for mobility purposes and a co-pilot app that shows them how to get from A to B in a sustainable way. We provide a management dashboard to each company to help put in place its mobility policies, oversee budgets and to monitor mobility-related CO2 emissions.

We have 120 clients in Belgium and France, including large corporates like Deloitte, L’Oreal and Carrefour. Our business model is quite simple. Each client pays a one-off account set-up fee per employee and then a monthly subscription per employee.

 What are the benefits of using skipr? 

We take away all the hassle for employers and employees. Companies spent lots of money during the COVID-19 pandemic paying for transport for employees who worked at home. Increasingly companies are looking at cost-saving solutions for when employees really are going to the office or travelling for work. Mobility managers are under pressure from all sides to change things but don’t have the tools to reduce costs and ease their workload. Without us, companies would not be able to offer the same level of service to their employees because it would require way too much work and administrative complexity over the legal risk and safeguards to prevent abuse of the system.

Offering employees flexible and sustainable mobility has other benefits because it supports a company’s brand, improves employee retention and enhances its reputation in reducing CO2 emissions.

What does skipr do differently from other MaaS solutions? 

We offer customers an employee payment card and an entire MaaS platform. For the moment no other company does that. To be successful, the product on the employers’ side needs a compliance framework so money given to employees is spent appropriately and we need to establish trust with employees so they leave their car at home. For me, the only way of providing maximum added value to both was to have a co-pilot app and a payment card.

We are also the only MaaS solution present in the two markets of Belgium and France. Skipr has no competitor that has expanded successfully so far. What made us successful is that from the start, we developed a platform so it would be very flexible in terms of mobility budgets and the rules companies can put in place to avoid abuses. Having a really flexible model means you can quite easily duplicate it in other countries.

How did skipr start?

Skipr began in 2018 as a project of Lab Box, the start-up studio of D’Ieteren, the large mobility group that is the exclusive importer, sales and leasing company for all the Volkswagen brands in Belgium.

I joined at the start of 2019, when there were already six people working there. The aim was to create a co-pilot app for consumers. It went live a couple of weeks after I joined and by the end of June we realised that it was going to be really difficult to be profitable. Competition was increasing, the only revenue was from commissions and people weren’t ready to pay for the service. That’s when we decided to pivot to a business audience.

We saw that companies could incentivise change in employees’ behaviour, particularly after Belgium introduced a mobility budget for corporate benefits packages in early 2019. It became clear we had a real first mover advantage, a healthy business model and prospects of having an impact in terms of sustainability.

 In July 2020 we raised €7 million in a Series A funding round in which the Belgian bank Belfius participated and we used the funds to expand into the French market. Then in September 2021 we did a capital raise with ALD Automotive under an agreement with Lab Box and Belfius.

What do you get from the relationship with ALD Automotive?

The partnership with ALD will enable us to develop our product through its knowledge and commercial network. ALD has a very ambitious expansion plan called Move 2025 to become a European leader in sustainable mobility. I believe that our products can be the glue between every product that ALD is creating - from the car sharing process to the actual leasing, to anything. So it’s a combination of very bold ambitions, extensive knowledge in terms of mobility and a very big commercial footprint in Europe. For us it was a logical step to take when we consider the plans for our growth.

It's still early days in the relationship. Before we expand outside Belgium and France, I want to make sure that the value proposition that we bring to the market is excellent and we’ve found the right way of collaborating with ALD. Then, from 2023, we will roll out skipr to other European countries. In five years I want skipr to be the market leader in every big city in Europe, having hundreds of thousands of users and saving thousands of tonnes of CO2 a year.

 How do you see your sector in the future?

The service component is often forgotten in MaaS, so there will be a time when companies have the option to add additional services like insurance and maybe fold it into the employee benefits package.

I'm a true believer that the social and environmental impact of the company will define its value. I think that changes are needed and so through for example through Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality, contextual data and more. MaaS will enter a new phase in helping people change their behaviour. It will become even more elaborate than just helping someone get from A to B, by factoring in the weather, personal preferences, gamification, information and real time data. In the future, in cities particularly, the car will be the backup plan and not the primary plan for mobility.

Tim, how is the partnership with skipr helping ALD?

Both our companies share a common vision on the future of mobility, which lies in providing flexible, efficient, cost-effective and sustainable solutions to our customers. As Mathieu mentioned, the pandemic has accelerated a shift in the mobility needs of our corporate clients and their employees shaped by cost, usage and the sustainability imperative.

Our investment in skipr marks a step change in our digital capabilities and will be instrumental for us in delivering on our tremendously exciting growth plans in Europe, as outlined in our Move 2025 strategy. Technology can enable us to transform our business model so we bring smarter and sustainable mobility solutions to our corporate customers and their employees, which is completely in line with the innovation goals of the Societe Generale Group.

Skipr has the agility and speed to bring to market solutions with an outstanding user experience, so together we can build a one stop shop MaaS solution designed for the future of mobility that will serve as the industry benchmark. Skipr is already working with us on ALD Move, our MaaS app in the Netherlands, which will go live next year, offering customers an enhanced suite of functions including our consultancy support, a travel co-pilot and access to our mobility products.