Benoît Chatelier on Ubeeqo new products and geographical expansion

French start-up Ubeeqo, specialising in corporate car-sharing, attracted a major new shareholder in the form of multi-national Europcar at the beginning of 2015. Ubeeqo founder and MD Benoît Chatelier tells us how things have gone since then, and outlines the new products which have recently been introduced.

Europcar became your major shareholder last year. How is the company you founded evolving within these new arrangements?

Benoît Chatelier: It is developing rapidly and we have been able to speed up our deployment in certain countries such as Germany, Belgium and England. The last of these came on line a few months ago. And we recently decided to expand our offering from the company market to include the private market as well. We launched two new product offerings exactly a year after the entry of Europcar into our company.

Explain how this move into the private market works.

Benoît Chatelier: This is really new for us, as we had been experts in corporate car-sharing since 2008. So we are really discovering a new world, and there is obviously more work to do. But the first months are going well, and the product we have introduced to the market is genuinely innovative. It is positioned as a real alternative to owning a car in an urban environment, this is how we conceived it.

So how does it work?

Benoît Chatelier: There are two products in fact. The first is a mobility app which is a sort of multi-modal reservation platform from which people can reserve and pay for different mobility solutions in an urban environment. For instance, car-sharing, car rental reservation in agencies, taxis and PHV. So people go onto the platform and have access to these services, with the prices shown – we have negotiated prices with the physical suppliers of the different modes of transport. You reserve and you receive a confirmation from Ubeeqo. And if ever there is a problem, people also contact Ubeeqo, the single point of contact. And at the end of the month, there is a single invoice for all the modes of transport which may have been used, and this comes from Ubeeqo too. The advantage for someone living in a city is that we offer solutions according to needs: if someone needs a car for a few hours there is car-sharing, if he needs it for a few days there is car rental, or maybe the need is for a taxi to go to the station or the airport. All of these are directly accessible from our platform.

The second reason why this is so interesting is because clients do not have to subscribe to different mobility solutions, and do not have to download different apps for each of them. They do not have to look for these services, which they may not know, or go through the often laborious process of registering for each one… They don’t have to give their credit card details to lots of different sites.  We have brought these services all together onto the Ubeeqo platform. The actual supplier of the service may be a taxi service company, or Europcar for car rental, or another supplier, but it is all under the Ubeeqo name.

You said it had started well…

Benoît Chatelier: Yes, we launched simultaneously in Paris and in London in January, and we are going to announce the launch of the service in several other cities within the coming weeks.

And what is the second service you talked of?

Benoît Chatelier: This is a car-sharing service with our own cars and our own technology. For example, we have already put 80 cars into the streets of Paris which can be reserved by Parisians for an hour, two hours, a day or two… This is paid for according to use, genuine car-sharing. It is like having ‘my car in front of my apartment’ except that I only pay for this car when I actually use it. This is not the case if you buy your own car – you pay for it whether you use it or not. The service is very complementary to a service such as Autolib’ which has average usage of a few minutes, but we are also very complementary to Europcar, which has longer rental times. We arrive in between.

Our service is called Matcha and it is a real alternative solution to owning a car. It is like ‘the car I didn’t want to actually buy’.

I should add that these new ‘private’ services are also available to SME’s and very small companies too. They have the advantage of the pricing we have negotiated

Returning to your original corporate service, is your clientele evolving here?

Benoît Chatelier: With the development outside of France, the core of clients is not necessarily French any more. But our traditional fleet management service for companies is in fact divided into three. The first service is company car-sharing, mostly with large companies. These are companies which wish to rationalise this resource of theirs, the car fleet – it has to be remembered that a company car is typically stationary for 95% of the time… The service can be compared to companies which share meeting rooms, or coffee machines among many members of staff – the car is going the same way.

The second company product is the mobility budget, an alternative to only having a company car. This is currently available in France, but we are going to develop it in other countries too. The employee chooses to have a smaller car, for example, and can spend the remaining part of his budget on car-sharing, on trains… And another statistic: it has been shown that employees in some countries have very large cars, but 90% of the time they are alone in them, commuting. It is often better to have a small, perhaps electric car for this, provided he can use a large car when he needs one.

The third product is management of the fleet and the driver, externalised fleet management. For us, this also means cars have to be connected; if they’re not, you can’t manage the fleet properly. With connectivity, we can generate 10-15% savings compared to other fleet management companies.

Baudouin de Mégille has just joined you. He has very wide fleet experience – what is his role?

Benoît Chatelier: He is director of the fleet management activity, he has the expertise for this. So we wanted him in order to reinforce our service offering in this domain ‘fleet and driver management’. He will help us develop this in France and internationally.

Does your new shareholder Europcar get involved in the operational management of Ubeeqo?

Benoît Chatelier: The philosophy of Europcar, when it took a stake in Ubeeqo, was to preserve the spirit of this company, preserve the reason they wanted to come into it in the first place. They closely follow what we do, of course, but we operate independently.