DUBLIN—Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, today announced that it will support MAN Truck & Bus to pilot MAN SimplePay—a product that will orchestrate payments between MAN truck fleet owners and their service partners, powered by Stripe payments and Stripe Connect.

MAN Truck & Bus, part of Traton Group, has played a prominent role in global logistics for more than 100 years and is one of the largest vehicle manufacturers in Germany. Their trucks and buses are regularly seen at construction sites and emergency response scenes, often with a Maersk container in tow.

Behind the scenes, an entire ecosystem of repair shops and adjacent services supports MAN vehicles, which can weigh more than 40 tons and travel millions of miles in their lifetime. Fleet companies—individual businesses which own and operate large numbers of MAN vehicles—need to administer payments for a wide range of services related to their trucks: maintenance and repairs, breakdown assistance, fuel, and toll and congestion charges.

Facilitating these payments is an important part of keeping the overall logistics chain running, but can create a fragmented workflow for fleet owners who need to juggle many third-party providers. To enable a frictionless and unified brand experience, MAN is bringing its partner repair shops and services into the MAN SimplePay platform.

More visibility for fleet managers

MAN fleet owners can now save payment methods to MAN SimplePay and assign them to a truck or group of trucks within their fleet to pay for services.

Take for example, Mobile24—a 24/7 service offered to MAN customers. Currently, when a truck breaks down or needs maintenance, the driver calls Mobile24 and a roadside assistance patrol is sent to repair the truck. The driver or fleet manager exchanges details with the repair operator, signs paper documents, and an invoice is sent to the truck operator some days later. The fleet manager does not have immediate visibility into how far along the payment is in the transaction process, or what payment information may be outstanding.

But with MAN SimplePay, the fleet owner is charged directly on the saved payment method for that specific truck, and funds are routed to the Mobile24 partner automatically. Fleet managers and logistics partners can see payment activity in real time, and no longer need to rely on paper-based systems or wait for individuals to send details from one partner to another.

“MAN SimplePay is a more efficient way for fleet owners to control and administer payments across their fleet,” said Johannes Huber, project manager of MAN SimplePay. “A fleet owner can operate multiple MAN vehicles which typically operate six or seven days a week. That’s a lot of payments to process and manage. MAN SimplePay digitalizes the whole process and adds payments to the list of jobs we want MAN vehicles to do for our customers.”