Podcast: Reins’ Tal Ginat on turning fleet payments into a growth engine
In this episode of Talks on Mobility, Tal Ginat, Chief Business Officer at Reins, talks orchestration, the shift to open-loop payments, and how forecourt retailers can grow their fleet business without tearing out everything that came before.
Tal Ginat explains why the company many will remember as Picafuel rebranded as Reins: to shift its focus from managing card issuers’ programs to actively growing them. He describes the problems he hears from retailers and issuers across Europe, Latin America and APAC alike: IT stacks that have swelled over two decades, with four or five systems trying to manage a single customer. At the same time, fleets themselves are getting harder to serve, mixing diesel trucks crossing borders with hybrid and electric company cars, and drivers who now expect to pay for tolls, parking and hotels on the same account. With corporate fleets accounting for roughly 60% of new car registrations in Europe, he argues the complexity is growing even faster than the number of vehicles.
His answer is what Reins calls an orchestration layer: one place, one policy and one account from which a retailer can offer fuel, EV charging, car wash, lubricants, loyalty and open-loop cards, making each new service a business decision rather than another integration project. Ginat stresses that a smooth customer journey goes far beyond a seamless checkout, running from onboarding and authorization through to invoicing and after-sales contact, and that professional drivers, for whom time is money, will switch to whoever makes their lives easier. On legacy systems, he advises against a rip-and-replace mindset, recommending small wins such as getting cards into Apple Pay and Google Pay wallets first to build confidence and secure senior buy-in.
Ginat also offers a practical take on AI, which he sees less as a chatbot on top of a loyalty app and more as a decision-making tool for tailoring offers, understanding share of wallet and comparing station performance, with Reins currently piloting an AI assistant that lets fleet managers create cards or pull transaction reports simply by asking. Looking ahead, he believes open-loop and scheme-based cards will let fuel retailers move into corporate, expense management and T&E cards, sizing the opportunity by a company’s headcount rather than its vehicle count, pointing to North America, where some players already report non-fuel volume matching their fuel volume.
Tal Ginat
Tal Ginat is Chief Business Officer at Reins (formerly Picafuel), a cloud-based mobility payments and orchestration platform that lets fuel retailers, fleet operators, mobility companies and card issuers launch, run and grow card programs. He has spent more than 15 years at the intersection of technology and commerce, starting out in engineering and product design before moving into global sales. Over the past eight years he has led business development at Reins, helping take it from an early-stage startup to a global platform partner for the mobility sector. He lives on the coast of Portugal, where he is a keen surfer.
“Historically, having a fleet card was never a hard thing. The problem grew when the systems behind it had to start working together as one.”
“For a professional driver, time is money. If you create more complexity for your users, they’ll eventually move to somebody else who makes their life easier.”
