All articles by Antonio Fabrizio
Antonio Fabrizio
Hire business 1car1 goes into administration
UK car and van hire business 1car1 has gone into administration, leaving 200 people without a job, and with another 600 at risk.
Taxing times for lessors’ association
The lack of credit available to car companies and the imminent new business car taxation regime dominate the agenda at the BVRLA for the coming year, Antonio Fabrizio discovers.
Software and systems update
Disposal platform wins new converts…Extranet enhancements for online management…
Betting on boost from brokers
Antonio Fabrizio talks to Jo Elms of Network about raising standards among brokers and the challenges of integration. LeasePlan UK has completely restructured its broker divisions, with the new changes becoming effective on January 1 2009. The UK branch of the Netherlands-headquartered lessor has brought together its two broker arms into one business unit under the Network brand, obtaining for all of the brokers an en masse membership within the BVRLA, the UK trade association for the vehicle rental and leasing industry. LeasePlan UKs Network franchise division, which covers the car and light commercial vehicle sectors, and a small intermediary broker division of Automotive Leasing, LeasePlans brand for the public sector in the UK, will be re-launched as one new business in January 2009, after preparatory work which took half of 2008 to complete, and which included several focus groups with brokers to work out together how best to restructure the company to boost its operations. Jo Elms, brand director of Network, tells Motor Finance that a legacy issue had been the cause for the long-time overlap of broker operations between Network and Automotive Leasing, but that it had never been addressed before. She says: There were a small number of Automotive Leasings brokers who did exactly the same things that Network does, because these are both businesses that we acquired historically, so we decided to change this.