The French fleet managing and car leasing company is number 1 in Europe and represents 3rd place worldwide. With 1.4. million vehicles, ALD Automotive expects to conquer the market even more.
Founded in 1946, ALD Automotive offers full service leasing, fleet management, outsourcing solutions and it can buy companies' cars and lease them back to them with 'sale and lease back' service. ALD Automotive is present in 43 countries including Luxembourg. Pierre-Yves Meert is the Marketing and Innovation manager of ALDAutomotive Luxembourg as well as the coordinator of ALD Automotive Benelux, which includes Luxembourg, Belgium and Neatherlands.
In 2014 ALD Automotive won the Best Leasing Company and Best Customer service categories on the Fleet Awards. In 2015 was the winner of the Digital Service Award, the Fleet Innovation Award and the Small and Medium enterprises category of the Luxembourg Quality and Excellence Award.
Car sharing is a trending move for new type of transportation. Do you think car sharing is a threat for ALD?
Car Sharing is definitely a new player on the mobility market. We don't see them as competitors but as partners. Our customers have different mobility needs and car sharing can only answer part of them.
Do you think digital helps connecting your customers with your business? How?
It can create additional touchpoints with the customer and can, although this sounds strange, improve communication. By 2025 75% of the active population will be millenialls, the connected generation. We need to adapt our ways to communicate with them.
Is digital helping ALD in internal management? To improve sales, for example?
In a growing complexity of the mobility sector, digital solutions can help us to explain things, to give appropriate advices and identify the right solutions.
Your digital integration is really strong among your service. Do you think digital businesses are now more important than ever? Why?
Yes, i think digital is important to upgrade every business. It can help us connect with customers and know their opinion in what we have to change or not. Even for us, ALD Automotive, is easier and faster to explain our service with digital help. Digital business is also becoming more complex, what is making it difficult to insource, certainly for smaller companies.
The customer behavior and society behavior has changed immensely. Technology has evolved, digital is now a part of everybody's life and cars are more autonomous each day. Do you think artificial intelligence will evolve so rapidly and consistently that services like ALD would be no longer needed?
ALD will change mobility. Transitioning to a fully autonomous world will take some time as it's not always clear what infrastructure will be needed to facilitate this evolution. A big part of our business is the funding, this will still be needed on autonomous cars and we'll do everything to be part of it. Autonomous cars will impact the operating services but there is a big potential for new ones.
The use of electric cars on your fleet management was your need or your customers demand? Is it more requested?
It's the customer who decides which car(s) he'll take, we advice him/her on the needs.
In Luxembourg you have a bike's and scooter's leasing service launched this year. Is this service contrasting with ald automotive main focus "using telematics to offer a better experience to the driver"?
Our purpose is to give the right transport mean at the right time at the right moment. The bike is part of the mobility ecosystem and contributes to a great customer experience.
What kind of digital innovations is ALD doing internally? Is ALD considering integrate Virtual reality?
In order to analyse customer needs we build together with other ALD entities of the group a fully digital Mobility experience integrating serious gaming and virtual reality.