AeviPod

The Fragmented Forecourt: From Petrol Stations To Mobility Hubs

Fuel and convenience forecourts have quietly become some of the most complex retail environments in the UK. Multiple ownership models, legacy pump technology, growing convenience offers, EV infrastructure, and an expanding mix of attended and unattended payments have created an estate held together by workarounds rather than design.

In this episode of The Fragmented Forecourt, Matt Oldham from Attenda joins Ghermaine Henry from Aevi to unpack why fragmentation is not a failure of operators, but the natural outcome of decades of layered decisions and competing priorities.
Together, they explore how forecourts have evolved from simple fuel stops into convenience destinations and emerging mobility hubs, and why payments sit at the center of making that shift work for both operators and customers.
In this episode, we explore:
  • Why forecourts are fragmented by design, from ownership models to on-site concessions and legacy POS
  • How adding EV charging, food, car wash, and unattended services increases complexity behind the scenes
  • Why customers do not care about payments until something breaks and what that means for experience design
  • The operational and cost challenges of running multiple payment solutions across one site
  • Why standardizing payments across fuel, retail, and unattended services is a critical first step
  • How EV dwell time changes the economics and purpose of the forecourt
  • The growing importance of customer understanding and data in environments where ownership is shared
  • What the future forecourt could look like as sites evolve into local mobility and retail hubs
Rather than chasing a perfect future state, this conversation focuses on practical realities. How operators can simplify what they already have, reduce friction across payments, and create a foundation that supports whatever comes next, whether that is EV growth, new services, or entirely new forms of mobility.

If you work in fuel retail, convenience, mobility, or payments and are grappling with legacy systems, fragmented estates, or the challenge of modernizing without disruption, this episode offers a grounded perspective on where to start and what really matters.

What is AeviPod?

Hosted by Aevi, this podcast explores how in-person payments are evolving across retail, ISVs, banking, and fuel & mobility.

Each episode brings together industry leaders, product owners, and operators to challenge established thinking, share practical product updates, and unpack the biggest learnings and obstacles they’ve faced along the way.

From payment orchestration and estate management to emerging payment technologies, regulatory change, and new in-store use cases, the focus is on what’s actually working, and what’s slowing progress down.

The conversations cut through fragmentation and legacy constraints to examine how modern payment ecosystems are being built, scaled, and operated across regions. Expect honest perspectives on decision-making, execution, and the trade-offs enterprises face as they modernise in-person payments.

Speaker 1:

Now we talk a lot about fragmentation in the forecourt, but what does it actually mean? In this conversation, Matt from Attenda takes a step back and explains why the fragmentation isn't a criticism. It's the natural result of ownership structures, legacy technology, and the evolution from a petrol station to becoming a retail hub. We unpack what's really driving growth. And spoiler, it isn't fuel.

Speaker 1:

What operators need to think about if they want to win in a world of EV charging, longer dwell times, and increasing complexity. This is the Fragmented Forecourt with Jermaine Henry from Aevi and Matt Oldham from Attenda.

Speaker 2:

Matt, please, for the people listening today, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're coming from?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I'm actually the chair of a business called Atender. This is a business that was founded by my father who got 30 ago. The background to the business was my father worked for one of the major oil brands for twenty five years. And when he says that the business corresponded with a time when all the major he worked for SS Shell BP.

Speaker 3:

They withdrew from being major retailers and turned it more to a wholesale model. And that left the, I guess, the fragmented Forecourt market that we're talking about today, which is mainly operated with with licensees and effectively franchisees. So my father spotted an opportunity to provide services to those sort of operators, and that business has grown and grown. We had a couple of other businesses as well, which is still strong, but the payments business specifically has really solved the problem for that complex point of sale that fuel retailers have to manage. Again, just to put that into context, your average, we're all consumers as well.

Speaker 3:

So your local fuel site has probably taken about 36 different card types or maybe more. A lot of those are quite expensive, and that that fuel retailer is actually a small operator, not a huge brand. My father created with his partner a proposition which was about making that simple for the operator and making it cheaper. And, obviously, it's grown and grown complexity over time, and and that space has really changed. And, again, if I've got real gray hair, I can remember this.

Speaker 3:

Twenty odd years ago, I used to go to an oily, greasy site and buy buy petrol and pack of fags. Whereas now, what you're looking at is a convenience retail environment, which is competing really with brands. It's got concessions, got QSR, and all that type of stuff. So that environment's really changing, I guess. Our proposition has changed to be able to facilitate that.

Speaker 3:

I think we're seeing a really interesting inflection point now as within a transition, different types of fuel coming on board with EV and other things coming onto the future, maybe hydrogen, synthetic fuels. But what is really becoming apparent is that these petrol stations, as we used to call them, are now really integrated retail hubs with complicated retail, and the fragmentation that we're talking about in this is a challenge and an opportunity for those operators to really create a good experience for people like you and I as consumers who can come on the various sites.

Speaker 2:

Matt, let me start by saying having gray hair is better than no hair as a sign. It's important to add that. But, no, on a serious note, there's a lot that I wanna unpack about what you said. But before we go into the details of the actual the four courts and what you do for your customers, You said that your dad set up the company. What prompted you to decide to join and take on the position that you're in today?

Speaker 3:

So mainly, it was a point when my dad left the business because I couldn't work with him because we're very similar, we used to rip us off. We used to bump heads. That's only partially true. So I I had my own businesses. I was doing my own thing, but was involved with with with Shoreside Group, which owns the tender as a nonexec.

Speaker 3:

And my dad was involved as chairman until he was pretty old. And at some point, said, look, son. It's time for you to step up a little bit. But it's it was a really good synergy because I've been working in card payments and and and cards and payments and loyalty space. So there was lots of things that from the outside.

Speaker 3:

So I was working with the likes of GE Capital, working with British Airways on loyalty partnerships. So there were lots of other things that I could bring in into the business as well. I think from scaled family business, have that sort of continuity as well has been been really important for the business as well. And it's also it's a passion play for our family. It's a business that's done done us really well over the last sort of thirty years.

Speaker 3:

It's a real privilege to to be in a situation I'm in where I can be a chair of a really thriving business.

Speaker 2:

It's so interesting that you say all of that. Right? I I personally have a passion for payments, but you've got an added layer of that because it's got that family continuity. So when you're talking about the problems in the forecourt, not only are you looking at it from a user perspective or an operator point of view, but there's always, a family tie. There's a familial bond there, which is super powerful.

Speaker 2:

So based on that particular theme, when we talk about fragmented forecourt and frictionless payments and whatnot, pretend I'm one of your operators. What are the kinds of what are the three key challenges that they're having in the forecourt that makes it difficult for them or provides friction that you're seeing?

Speaker 3:

Okay. Let me if I I'll answer that question. If I'll maybe take a step back and say Sure. Why is it a fragmented forecourt? Because it sounds like a criticism, and it isn't.

Speaker 3:

It's it's circumstances. So the whole fuel environment is broken up into different ways. So firstly, the macro level in terms of ownership of the fuel estate across I think there's about 8,400 fuel sites across The UK, and there's a mix of ownership between major oil brands like Shell and BP still own and operate, for example, some sites themselves as company owned retail sites. Then you've got the hypermarkets, and Tesco Sainsbury's that do huge volume and, obviously, super price competitive. And then you've got sort of independents independents, which are probably the bulk in terms of the number of fuel sites operating under licensees, whether you might have a an SO or a BP side, but it's run as a licensee.

Speaker 3:

And then you've got franchise operators, the groups like the likes of Certas, GreeneG, MFGEG, who are operating a franchise group with a lot of those independent retailers. So there's fragmentation in terms of that ownership. And then in terms of the site itself, if you've got a site, there's there's a site owner. There's the brand of the fuel that that is enticing people in. And you've got an operator, then you've got convenience stores and concessions.

Speaker 3:

So you've got so if I look at my local site around the corner, it's a Texaco site with an operator that who isn't Texaco got an ASDA shop. So there's multiple brands and multi ship multiple ownership layers there. And then you got the then you've got the fuel, which is the fuel margin, which is controlled centrally, and the retail margin, which is operated locally. And then you've got increasing complexity being added in now with the likes of EV hardware being introduced, and most fuel retailers are really working hard to monetize their sites. They're bringing it on.

Speaker 3:

There's a big investment at the moment on vanitying. We've got site operators that are trying to monetize every aspect of their site with things like external laundromats. We've got retailers with hot pizza vending. I know a lot of these require different points of sales, different integrations. And, again, you've got an extra layer of complexity, as I said before, about the number of cards, but also you've got a pump trigger.

Speaker 3:

So you've got this complex you've got this complex forecourt environment often with lots of different points of sales and competing brands. So I think some of the challenges that we're talking with our clients about is how can you create a single payment proposition across multiple points of sale and make that seamless and transparent from the customer. We often talk in payments about the payment experience, and it really grinds my gears because customers don't care. They just wanna pay for whatever they they'd do go. And that takes a lot of work in the background to make sure that is seamless and as cost effective as possible for that retailer.

Speaker 3:

So how can we create an acquiring environment which allows that across multiple things? I think some of the challenge again, that's probably the the first challenge. The second challenge is around that they're talking to us about is things like, what does that mean? Is that a competitive threat or a complementary threat? And, again, that in most fuel sites, you look at the moment, historic historically, have been designed around fast service.

Speaker 3:

So an average dwell time for an ICE vehicle is about three to five minutes, and we all know the drill because we've been doing it for years. We turn up. We pump. We pay. We grab a Kit Kat, and we bugger off.

Speaker 3:

Whereas if it's in an EV situation, not all sites have the infrastructure to be able to to that that would be suitable. And even if they do, the dwell time is completely different. It's twenty to forty minute dwell time on a site. Does that work with the operating model of that site in terms of the flow? What wins and what loses in that EV thing is about people are there for for a long period of time.

Speaker 3:

Are there things for people to do there, or they're just gonna sit in their car? Is the convenience retail or the the environment that people can wait in, is that suitable for that? So that's a challenge that I think fuel retailers are working towards. And as we get into the next wave of EV, the easy EV rollout's been done. Like, people like me can have a an EV on my driveway.

Speaker 3:

And the second harder rollout of EV is for people who don't have their own driveways. So you're looking at how can I charge my car when I can't park it outside? The network operator that presented for by by the fuel retail estate creates a really good opportunity. So I think that's something that that a lot of fuel retailers are wrestling with. I think then the third one, and again, this does speak to that fragment fragmented nature of the forecourt is customers, our clients, partners are talking to us about owning the customer and understanding the customer.

Speaker 3:

A lot of our retailers really good retailers still struggle to understand who their customer are, and that's often because they don't own the customer. So if you look at some of the large loyalty propositions that a a brand might have, let's say, Nectar, they're not necessarily sharing that data with the operator themselves. So who is my customer? What's my profile of customer? How does that compare with the cluster of sites around me?

Speaker 3:

Am I getting the high volume commercial drivers, and what can I do to influence them? So that quest for data and not just data, that what can I do to influence when you're operating in a fragmented site where your brand on the front isn't necessarily who owns the customer? So that that's the challenge. So I think that was a really long and rambling answer. Sorry about that.

Speaker 2:

No. Matt, look. You touched on a lot of things, and I'm just gonna quickly play back my understanding of what you said. And I have a few questions that I wanna dig into because the topic you touched on are very interesting. If I'm an outsider looking in and I'm looking at what Fragmented Forecourt means, from your perspective, you take a macro view and say, look.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of owners of different fuel brands with different priorities. You've got different setups in terms of some owned or managed by the company. Some are dealer owned and managed. And because of that complexity there, there's a there's a con there's a conflict sometimes in terms of what direction you go. To add another layer to that, some of them are built on legacy technologies.

Speaker 2:

So you've got multiple lanes which have been there for a number of years, whereas you've got newer innovations like EV, which are quite new about built on cloud based solutions, so they're quite fresh. But now you've got this conflicted priority of ownership and operation potential. You've got multiple lanes of technology that don't converge. And then finally, tap tap it off. From a data point of view, you can't see anything across the whole board, and then you've gotta make a profit.

Speaker 2:

So you're sending pizzas, air vac, and all these other things. So all of these are happening at the same time while I need to run a business, keep my staff happy, make some money, keep everyone going. So my question to you would be this. Where do I start? Knowing that all of these problems exist and all of this fragmentation is here and the causes of that fragmentation, if I were to remove some of that pain, where's the best place for me to start as an operator?

Speaker 2:

And treat me like I'm one of your potential clients or existing clients.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So I think that's a really good question, and I think where do you start? You it's like in any business. You start from having a good customer proposition that is gonna bring people in. And I think that who are the winners and losers in this?

Speaker 3:

The people who are really doing very well in this space, and there's a lot of success. I think there's actually there's a real increase of investment in this space, I think there's more site have to double check this. I think there's more fuel sites this year than there were last year. So it's it's people are actually investing in this space. The winners in this space are people who are investing in the experience of the customer.

Speaker 3:

So it's it's convenient having a really strong convenience retail proposition or food to go proposition. And we're seeing that in the lights of EG on the Move because they've published their stats in terms of what they're doing in their reports, basically saying 20% growth, and it's on the back of their non fuel proposition. Similarly with ROMtech got really strong results, and that is on the back of really strong relationships with the likes of Morrisons and their daily Morrisons proposition. So people it needs to be a destination for people to come. There's even some data the tipping point is beyond the point of, on average, people are coming now to a fuel site, a forecourt, not to buy fuel.

Speaker 3:

They're buying something else. So they're coming to a fuel site not for fuel, but for convenience retail. And I think this is, like, 11% of people actually coming in to browse and not actually buying anything. So the fuel now isn't the main driving point of that. It's the other offer.

Speaker 3:

And in some urban areas, it's as much as it's only 20% of people coming to that site are coming for fuel. 80% of it is for the other offer. So the starting point is getting that that consumer offer to be really strong. And then once you've got that, how can yeah. What customers don't like is a different mechanic for different things.

Speaker 3:

So having to use one payment. If you're coming in and paying, having to use something different for fuel than you are for the coffee concession, that's just why isn't the same thing? So that that's an area of of customer confusion, but it's also adding complexity in the back office. So wherever possible from a from an acquiring perspective and therefore a cost perspective. So I think one of the main things that we're trying to talk to our customers about is how can you have a one solution from a payment and an acquiring perspective, regardless whether that's attended or unattended, I.

Speaker 3:

Whether it's in the shop or whether it's for the valet ticket. It's a sing single solution across that. And that's what we're we've got very active conversations and we can move forward across that. It's helped by the fact that there's a move towards contactless technology. Again, you don't have to go back very far before you were pushing pound coins for your air tower.

Speaker 3:

Now it's contactless. So they're they're better, easier, more cost effective solutions for our retailers to be able to as well. But yeah, creating that standardization in the front and the back of the payment experience is really key.

Speaker 2:

Okay. So assuming then that I know my customer proposition, I understand that convenience retail is booming, I need to find a way to bring my customers locally to my site. That's clear. We know what proposition got loyalty in place. And then the challenge now for us is that standardization.

Speaker 2:

Talk me through what standardization actually looks like because most operators typically would have legacy multistacks, which are not standardized, and and to try and standardize them is a man of task. So could you just talk me through an example of how you would get from a fragmented back end to make a more simplified back end to give a customer journey a bit more seamless.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So you talked before about legacy technology. If you think about one of the key reasons I know we're saying convenience is really important, but it's still fuel at the end of the day. So a lot of the fuel pump technology is ten to twenty years old often, and you've got also point of sale material, particularly in that sort of independent sector, is owned by the operator. So we might and again, I'm not gonna use the brand, but we have a partner who has hundreds of sites within a operated under a group.

Speaker 3:

Because the owner operators own their point of sale, they'll have a variety of different kit in terms of the POS. And that there there are dominant providers, but there's one key player who has really good penetration within that, but there's other edge cases around it. So you have one brand, let's say a few 100 sites operating under that brand, maybe five or six different pod hardware solutions, and one one overall deal that we're gonna operate. So the key thing for us is to be able to onboard that and integrate all those different POS solutions so we can create a single solution for all involved. And I guess it's sort of the whole thing about how how do you you know, the Irish proposition.

Speaker 3:

How do you get to Tipperary? I wouldn't start from here. Because we've been doing it for a long time, we do have integrations with all these different things. Starting from scratch on that will be really hard, but because we've built up those integrations over a long period of time, we can do that matrix matching of solution and and making sure that you can create a single consistent payment solution across a fragmented environment like that.

Speaker 2:

And so based on that description you've given, and you mentioned a lot of examples of where you've seen success, not just in the open market, but in in the clients you work with. And I was reading up about, their mind and mobility report that you guys published, and I found it fascinating. What's the driver behind the information that you put out in the report, and who are you targeting that information to?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I think one of the reasons why we created the report, which was consumer focused, is that we you you guys and and and as we spend a lot of time in in the payment sector talking to about payments things to payments people and we get very excited innovations and things like that, but we often forget about the end user and we forget about the actual person. And one of the things that we, you know, we talk about payments as if it matters. But from a consumer, you don't care. You're just buying that product.

Speaker 3:

You're just buying that Mars bar or you're buying that holiday or you're buying buying petrol. You're not conscious of the point of transaction unless it breaks, and then you really care about it. So I think as a sector, what we really wanted to do is, can we turn the telescope around the other way and and look at things slightly differently? What do customers care, particularly in mobility payments? What are the things that are grinding their gears?

Speaker 3:

And guess what? We're consumers as well. It won't be a big surprise. That things that really irritate people are when payments fail for stupid reasons. And I think within that report, I think one of the things that really resonated with me was the amount, I think about 20% of people have had a parking fine because of a failed payment.

Speaker 3:

And that can be as something as stupid as you need to pay by app and there's no Wi Fi in the area. Or within that EV space as well, there is load of friction at the moment. It's been a bit of a wild west as people have been going out and flag planting different EV solutions around around the country. It's very con confusing from a customer perspective. There's terminal failures.

Speaker 3:

People are taking pre authorizations several times, and I don't understand why I've had a £100 taken from my account and then I've had back in four days' time. So these things are actually irritating from a consumer perspective. Why we wanna highlight this as well is not is is not just a moan to payments people like ourselves about this, but these things erode brand trust. And often they're not based on common sense, they're based on rollouts of solutions without thinking about it. Getting back to the forecourt, it means that you need to think about the customer experience when you're placing new things on your site and really making sure it works.

Speaker 3:

I think the the example that I would use is I once went this is gonna sound really bizarre. I want once went on a study trip to Las Vegas. It's where it's where a lot of innovation is made in retail, in payments, in loyalty, and they if you go to a they test everything. Everything is tested to the m for three. So the casinos, when you get a payout and it goes or you tap the button, the sound that it makes is tested.

Speaker 3:

Everything is done on customer testing. They would never ever roll out anything to to their customers haven't been tested. And and but we seem to be we seem to be okay with this rolling stuff out without getting the consumer involved in it. And I think it's a the reason for this, the report, is to help us payments professionals just think about the consumer as we're innovating. There's amazing innovations happening in payments.

Speaker 3:

I I love that. And we're all in for new innovations, but we need to take all stakeholders with us. And I think that is very true when we think about regional disparities. So a lot of our customers are have nationwide distribution. There is not an even distribution of payment attitudes and payment infrastructure geographically.

Speaker 3:

And some of that we talked about is Wi Fi not being enabled in certain areas. In London and the Southeast, it's really easy to adopt new payment technology, less so in rural Northeast England. So how can we get solutions work consistent consistently across nationwide brands? I think that's really important. You you know what I'm I think another stat that we can cross on that is only 2% of 65 year old and older have got a they've got a digital wallet.

Speaker 3:

And you can write that off as, well, that's just old people. That's that's a quarter of the paying population in The UK are not using digital wallet for payment, but that's the movement of travel in terms of where we want if you go to payment conferences, you would assume there was 100% of people paying with digital wallets 100% of the time. It's not. In our report, it showed that the second preferred method of payment was cash. And this is in an industry which is obsessed with cashless, seamless, frictionless things.

Speaker 3:

People are saying cash because they fully understand it. They trust it. We know how it works, and we need to take everyone with us when we're introducing new technologies to make sure people fully understand it. I think fuel wet fuel, people understand that because we've been doing that for years. I think the challenges are when we're introducing new things like EV propositions on the forecourt where there's lots of different solutions and they all have different quirks and traits and apps and this, the other.

Speaker 3:

We need to try and work out how can we make this simpler for the consumer because that's the most important thing for us.

Speaker 2:

From what I'm hearing then, Matt, was really about understanding the end user. Us. All of us. Everyone that works in payments pretty much has an experience at Forecourt so we have an idea of what it feels like. You compiled a lot of statistics, and you're talking to the operators, the fuel providers, and you and and right at the beginning, you said when we were talking, what should I focus on as an operator?

Speaker 2:

And you were saying, what is your proposition? So I can hear from your general theme, everything starts from the end user and work backwards from that. If you can please your customer, if you can engage your customer, then you're in a good starting point, and everything else can be built with that as your north star. That in mind, how do you see payments innovation over the next three to five years, specifically in The UK? Let's take London and the Southeast because they're they adopt digitally more than most areas.

Speaker 2:

Where do you see payment innovation going that if Forecourts are not prepared for, they could get left behind? And if they are prepared for, they could really exploit that market.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I think that's a a really good question, and I think we can link almost like the future of payments to the future of the forecourt in in in this topic. And I think I mentioned before about what was a petrol station like, and we used to call them petrol stations rather than retail yeah. Comedian Street. Petrol station twenty years ago, and what will it be like twenty years in the future, and what will need to be in place for that to work.

Speaker 3:

So if I was to to roll forward now, because I think what we've seen over the last five years and certainly more intensively in the last two years, is this investment and shift to dramatically towards convenience retail. I think we're gonna see the next shift is gonna be to these mobility hubs. The network as it stands at the moment is great. It's in urban areas. It's in rural areas.

Speaker 3:

It's got distribution. We're gonna have different modes of transport and different modes of fueling. The fuel the Forecourt is really well placed to do that. So I could see an environment where there's a mix of mix of energy stations. So you will still have legacy ice for a long period of time.

Speaker 3:

We'll still have EV charging, but they'll have different areas, different zones within a forecourt. And then there'll be new areas as well, hydrogen, which still needs fixed fixed locations on other things that in twenty years time that we're not thinking about now. How we consume those is gonna alter depending on what it is. In that EV space, dwell times are gonna be massively increased from five minutes to twenty minutes plus. So how does that retail environment mirror that?

Speaker 3:

Will there be areas for coffee, co working, and then other opportunities within that to provide services? You're already seeing things like parcel endpoints of last mile nodal services. I can imagine that there would be spaces which look quite different, but still at at its heart are monetizing the dwell time or monetizing the opportunity to come there. I think it will be there'll be we'll see more seats, more more seated people. The again, the winners will be people who create really great environments that are good to be there, where people are gonna go there regardless of transportation.

Speaker 3:

It's just because it's a good local hub. Now in terms of matching that in payments, I think we're gonna see we we are not gonna be tapping pieces of plastic on little square boxes in twenty years' time or pushing. Depends on when you're not gonna be use using cash. Will there be different methods of recognizing people? So things like number plate recognition when we go in, subscription models for for our energy use, and also having the ability to have, yeah, completely cash cashless environment within that.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, I can absolutely see there's gonna be a shift in payments, but it's going to mirror the change in that sort of environment as we move towards a mobility hub. And that's going to create integration between other forms of mobility. So I can imagine mobility hubs having e scooters on that. You'll see from the report the amount of spend per month on e scooters already is really it really shocked me how much it was. So there's clearly massive sort of other areas that kinda go there.

Speaker 3:

And we see there already that that is gonna be app based, subscription based solution. So will there be a till? You know, to use a better word, till with someone standing behind it? I don't think so. I think there'll be lots of different ways.

Speaker 3:

And I think the majority of that will be unattended as well. So people coming into a retail environment where there's no people there other than people managing the inventory, buying using, yeah, different unattended unattended technologies. So I think that will be the big shift from attended payments to unattended payments and different methods of doing that.

Speaker 2:

So here's the killer question, Matt. How can a tender help me get through that place in twenty years? How can your company help me shape the future?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. It's a really good that's the question we need to be asking ourselves as a business all the time. And I think where we're doing well in that is in the partnerships that we've had for a long really long lasting time where we're infrastructurally integrated and operationally integrated with our partners and facilitating the change. I don't wanna overemphasize the o word, the orchestration, but I think that's really key because that's gonna enable us to enable our clients to have different forms of retail, unattended, attended with underneath the same umbrella agreement, and we can bring in different form factors, use different acquire acquirers should we need to for different parts of the business. Again, the key thing from our partners is that they want one one payment solution, one payment partner, not having to go somewhere else for that particular thing.

Speaker 3:

So that orchestrating that across across re their retail environment and making sure not only are we ready when they come up with new ideas that we want to do, but we're also actively encouraging saying, we are ready to let you you can do this should you want. One of the things that we are increasingly becoming active on, and this is partly been led from our clients asking for it and partly us thinking about it as well, is creating data solutions. We we get millions and millions of of payments coming through going through our systems every day. How can we use that data to help them inform decision making as well? So that's another area that we can definitely step up into and help our clients.

Speaker 3:

Because, again, it comes back to the winners in the future of this fragmented forecourt are gonna have are gonna be destination retailers on a local basis, local destination retailers. And to to really win across that, it's absolutely simplification across the payment environment, and the real winners are gonna be able to utilize data to be able to offer their customers who they can recognize and see that they are their customers the products that they want.

Speaker 2:

Who would benefit from listening to this discussion we just had? And why do you think they'd get something out of it?

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Great question. Again, I think people within the fuel, retail, and convenience sectors, you know, we are we have we are having those conversations today, and we obviously wanna speak to more people about this. We also wanna really hear we listening is great, but I think the most important thing for us is hearing back from retailers about what your challenges are. And then as we've said before, really encourage them to listen to their consumers.

Speaker 3:

So we'd love to have this conversation with our clients as we are already doing, people who don't work with us already, but I think the most important thing for any business is to really listen hard to to the client needs and to their their end consumers and make sure it's a dialogue rather than it being one way. We don't know all the answers. We know things that don't work because we make mistakes, and we try and learn from those. But having a two way conversation with people in payments is the key thing, and that's really linking up the payment providers, merchants, or retailers, however you wanna describe them, and then also their consumers, making sure that all three of those things are completely linked together.

Speaker 1:

Folks, we are very fortunate to have industry experts, decades of knowledge from people like Matt on the show. Huge thanks to Matt for sharing his insights. One thing is very clear from the conversation. Fragmentation isn't going anywhere. The challenge looks very similar across a multitude of fuel retailers in The UK, across Europe, and most likely across the world.

Speaker 1:

Multiple POS stacks, different acquirers, EV rollouts happening in parallel with legacy systems, no unified view of the customer. It's no longer theoretical. It's happening everywhere. In the next few months, the Fragmented Forecourt is going to go deeper on how retailers are actually tackling this, what's working, what's breaking, and where orchestration and standardization can become competitive advantages. We're going to be going to see some of the manufacturers of all terminals and hardware, and we're gonna go behind the scenes as we speak to the biggest fuel retailers on the planet to understand the challenges shaping fuel retail today.