Innovation Insider towards SG’s North Star. Let's talk with John Saffrett about Electric Vehicles, Connected Cars, Mobility and Platforms

SG is present in 62 countries, driving innovation for our customers by unleashing the collective intelligence of our 138 000 colleagues is an adventure every day! Time to meet our innovators leading the transformation of our businesses and creating new business models towards SG’s North Star: ‘Building together, with our clients, a better and sustainable future through responsible and innovative financial solutions.’

Let's stop in England with John Saffrett, the deputy CEO of ALD Automotive the Europe’s largest player and a leading international provider of vehicle leasing and fleet management services to corporate customers and private individuals with over 1.4 million vehicles under management. John is one of the Brits you really want to hang-out at a barbecue on sunny Sunday afternoon. With a true entrepreneurship mindset, he successfully transformed ALD, the leader of car-leasing in Europe, into a full-fledge Platform. From his road trip to the US to find inspiration and partnerships, to his commitment to diversity by having a fantastic women commando team at the helm of ALD’s digital and innovation transformation, I do feel at home each time I speak with him.

John, could you please tell us about the changes of ALD under your leadership?

We set out five years ago as a leadership team to project ALD in the future mobility ecosystem and to define the position and space we could occupy there. To do this we moved away from a product centric approach and instead defined the capabilities (‘muscles’ I like to refer to them!) we would need to develop in order to play a leading role and then we set about building an organisation around this. This thinking helped shape our resourcing in the organisation as well as our project portfolio and it contained a focus on building digital and connected car capabilities, developing flexibility and new modes of transport in our offer, the establishment of an innovation community within ALD and the building out of a number of core strategic mobility platforms upon which we could build our future. These platforms, we call them our International Digital Framework (‘IDF) are built upon core technologies centred around opening up our systems to provide more agility in meeting our clients needs (API, microservice) and the development of a new technology ecosystem where we partnered with external players, established and startups, to help accelerate our platform evolution.

"These investments have allowed us to develop new client facing partnerships with companies such as Amazon, Tesla, Polestar, Bipi and Ford where we can leverage the agility of these new platforms to provide customised unique and seamless digital journies for our partners in a rapid manner." 

They allow a partner to connect with us through one interface but access services in multiple countries and remove all of the complexity from the partner. And we can then utilise these micro components for our own direct channels and offers so the reusability is extremely high.

You’ve announced a strategic partnership with Vinli a direct consumer company that allowed owners to add cloud services to their mobile

Yes. Connected car was one of the key areas where we needed to build muscle and we were never going to be able to keep up with the dedicated players. However a number of the established companies in the space didn’t offer the kind of flexibility with their platforms and development capabilities that we were looking for and then we found Vinli who are a perfect match for our ambitions. Getting data from a car is simple now but the challenge for everyone is doing something useful with it, valorising it, making it interesting for our clients or for our internal operating model. The Vinli platform lets us do this and comes with a rapid development toolkit, is now fully integrated with our contract management platforms and also comes with a data science tool out of the box so the possibilities will be endless!

Our Group Innovation and Digital strategy is focused around scaling-up Artificial Intelligence, Open Banking and Open Innovation, what are your main achievements to date?

For ALD, open banking is about opening up our front office tools and back office platforms so that partners can benefit from customisable interactions. The danger of digital is that you can easily become commoditised by an aggregator platform but it also offers huge potential to strengthen your brand by offering unique and brilliant customer journeys. So the development of the IDF that I talked about earlier gives us a unique capability here. 

"But it’s one thing to build a technology platform – the really complicated and difficult part is building a digital culture to support this revolution." 

As a leadership team we identified some profiles internally who we felt were best equipped to support our vision and we empowered them to go and drive the culture change. We also encouraged them to go and meet all of the exciting startups emerging in the mobility space and be ambassadors for the group in these interactions. Startups think and act differently and we felt they were much better equipped to associate and ideate alongside these new players and it has been tremendously successful! The team have established strong viable working relationships with a lot of key players, they have embraced the empowerment and been brave enough to experiment (and to fail!) and they evangelised in the organisation to bring other people with them on our journey. They are the key to the platform being successful for us as without them all we have is just another technology asset but you need to inspire people to understand its potential if it is going to create real value for you.

What’s your commitment to build a more Sustainable future in Automotive?

We believe that ALD can play a key role in supporting the move to a more sustainable future. We have a clear plan focussed around a number of areas to ensure that we become a more responsible company and employer as well as supporting our clients in their transition towards a cleaner mobility future.

The approach is based on four key pillars each of which is supporting by a detailed plan with precise targets for us to meet: Supporting the move to sustainable mobility, being a responsible employer, ensuring we operate with suitable business culture and practices and minimising our internal carbon footprint

"In the area of sustainable mobility we have focussed on developing a strong knowledge of the technologies shaping the future of alternative powertrains and have established strong partnerships with a number of the new exciting EV brands such as Polestar and Tesla to get much closer to the product evolution and lifecycle." 

This in turns feeds the knowledge and guidance we can give to our clients through our consulting teams to help them understand how they can make the transition to a more sustainable future. And all of this information helps us understand the pricing and financial dynamics which are crucial in our industry to ensure we can offer our clients competitive pricing, supported by the appropriate government grants, to accelerate the shift.

Where do you see Car leasing and Car Financing in 5 years?

Leasing will remain a growing product in the automotive industry as the megatrend from ownership to usage continues. Coupled with a shift to a subscription based economy, full service leasing today offers all the benefits of an all in subscription for the vehicle of choice. Now the challenge is to build in flexibility into the model and this normally is present across three axes: period, car of choice, distance travelled. So we are playing and developing products across all three areas with partners to learn about the demands and behaviours of our clients in this new paradigm. With the rollout of electric vehicles we are seeing a shift into multi cycle lease where a car can be re-leased 3, 4 of even 5 times and therefore we have industrialised our flex and used car leasing capability to offer in most of our major markets and this will be a growing area for us. 

Also we should recognise that the world of urban mobility, car sharing, ride hailing etc., is a fleet management game. The foundation of these platforms is operators running large fleets of vehicles across a territory and most of these operators will require funding capacity and global service providers who can manage and fund these vehicles at competitive rates and hence the large leasing companies are in a very strong position to play a major role here. The full range of car financing products will remain in play but as subscription becomes more and more the ‘norm’ for car usership, the leasing offers will gain market share.

In all cases we face some exciting challenges and opportunities in the mobility sector and at ALD we are super excited about what lies in front of us

3 key words to describe yourself?

Kind, Thoughtful, Inquisitive

Thank you John! If you enjoyed it, please like it or Share it!