Mobility as a Service is a concept that aims to provide users and companies with seamless access to a variety of mobility options, such as public transport, car-sharing, bike-sharing, ride-hailing, etc., through a single digital platform that integrates planning, booking, payment and information services. Mobility as a Service has the potential to reduce the dependency on owned vehicles and equuipment, optimize the use of existing infrastructure and resources, lower the environmental impact, and create new business opportunities and value propositions for mobility providers and stakeholders.
New mobility concepts and the "share economy" will need new asset based funding solutions.
Donald Wachs, Head of BearingPoint Products
In this edition of our blog, we interview Donald Wachs, the Global Head of BearingPoint Products, who will share his insights on Mobility as a Service, its challenges and opportunities, and how BearingPoint is supporting the transition to a more sustainable and efficient mobility system.
What we observe is that it becomes more and more frequent that producers of vehicles no longer aim to sell the vehicles. They rather offer the automobiles to the market for usage while retaining ownership of the objects. The period a client might use a car may range between a short term rent up to a longterm lease.
Demand-wise this reflects amongst others the trend, that ownership of goods is no longer the name of the game, but rather flexible options to use goods. This goes hand in hand with developments such as pay per use, urban mobility concepts or car-sharing. For the OEMs on the other side, the concept of circularity puts manufacturers in the position, to create a prolongued life cycle for their goods and parts, to make their consumption of resources more sustainable and ultimately to have an additional path to enable their transition.
Obviously, it makes a significant difference when you no longer sell a good and receive the purchase price in full to cover your production cost. If this is replaced for example by pay per use revenue streams, you will face a considerable capital and liquidity mismatch challenge. It is therefore pivotal, to control your goods anytime and anywhere, to manage your contracts diligently and to adapt your funding by making use of the rent or lease contracts. In other words, Asset Based Funding will become vital to run your operations.
The existing legacy IT systems, however, are hardly capable of mapping the corresponding customer journeys as well as the numerous new requirements for the OEMs across the entire value chain (from sales through contract management to refinancing). Therefore, not only is an optimally coordinated and forward-looking transformation management needed, but also suitable IT systems that take all relevant interfaces into account, thereby enabling fully integrated solutions.
Mobility as a Service is a promising and disruptive concept that can transform the future of mobility. However, it also faces significant challenges and barriers that require a collaborative and holistic approach from all the relevant actors in the mobility ecosystem. BearingPoint is committed to supporting the transition to Mobility as a Service, by providing our clients with the best of our knowledge, skills and solutions from Leasing, Rental, Equipment Management, to Asset Based Funding, and by collaborating with them to create innovative and sustainable mobility solutions that benefit everyone.
