You may not have heard of Arvato Financial Solutions, but it’s one of the financial powerhouses of Europe. According to Kay Dallmann, Senior Vice President, Accounting, at Arvato Financial Solutions, it’s a “hidden champion” that you often only see in the T&Cs of some of the world’s digital giants.
Dallmann was one of the key speakers at the SHIFTx Mobility event held in Berlin in September, 2021.
As cars become more complex and more connected, the area of digital payments and e-commerce is becoming more important for vehicle owners, passengers, and the car manufacturers. Arvato, part of the Bertelsmann family, seeks to ensure a seamless user experience. Its services include payment and financing, credit risk management, user identification and advanced fraud detection.
“We will do anything from the initial risk assessment, so from the very early identifying whether you are a trustworthy and creditworthy person. And then down to complex billing and rating, in order to ensure that you have the right invoice,” explains Dallmann.
In the mobility sector Arvato Financial Solutions has helped Sweden’s Lynk & Co pioneer a new mobility concept across seven European countries.
“We’ve helped them to launch a community platform approach, where basically, you have in parallel various streams of ownership. You can either buy the car, you can lease the car, you can own the car by subscription. And at the same time, having this car now in your possession, the community gives you the possibility also to share that car with friends and family and community members.”
Arvato Financial Solution is very much the financial backbone for this innovation. Dallmann believes this is a sustainable and revolutionary approach to car ownership is both sustainable and revolutionary.
Alain Visser, CEO at Lynk & Co, concurs: “As an expert in mobility, we want to make it simple and hassle free for consumers to access a car. If a car is shared between our members, then payment between them must be equally simple and smooth as well. Arvato Financial Solutions has exactly the expertise for implementing the complex payment processes that we were looking for. Together we developed the concept step by step. Always with the ambition of being radically simple and having the customer in focus along the entire customer journey.”
The shared economy is also fast becoming a factor across mobility and other sectors. “We have seen it in the e-commerce area, once you have this reliability of having access to products that can be shared, then it’s always a steppingstone towards convenience that basically drives the sharing of the product,” says Dallmann.
Looking further into the future, Dallmann sees opportunities as well as challenges for the big car manufacturers. “We really think there’s a lot of movement within the car industry, a lot of things will be determined on the software and the technology and the connectivity. And I’m hoping that the car industry is uniting itself in order to really reap the benefits to make that happen.”
He also thinks that autonomous transportation will have a big impact on the user experience. “We’re probably talking more than a decade, but if the car can really drive autonomously, and can then pay at the charging point to be charged, it basically ensures that that our life gets a bit more convenient with regards to shopping, with regards to delivery, orchestration of other people.”
Finally, Dallmann painted a picture of what urban mobility will look like by the end of the decade. “In Germany, we have the smart city. So, there’s a lot of regulation in order to ensure that the cars in the city are basically being reduced. Cities like Amsterdam are reducing parking space. So, it will be an interplay. It won’t be only the car, but it will be us moving in an ecosystem for mobility.”
He concludes: “It will be fascinating. If you think what we can do now with our laptops and phones, ten years can be quite a jump.”
To find out more about SHIFT Mobility and SHIFTx, follow the link: SHIFT Mobility (shift-mobility-ifa.com)
