Bestpass acquires Fleetworthy to offer comprehensive toll, compliance management solution

Toll management and payment platform Bestpass has acquired Fleetworthy Solutions, a fleet, compliance, safety, and risk management solutions provider. With the acquisition, the Bestpass suite of services will offer a comprehensive tolling, compliance, and safety solution.

It's part of Bestpass CEO Tom Fogarty's vision of creating a comprehensive fleet management solution. When asking his customers what they needed apart from the company's toll management and vehicle tax solutions, they frequently responded that they needed not only the ability to track compliance information such as vehicle registration and licensing but also to be able to make sense of it all.

That's where Fleetworthy's platform, CPSuite, comes in, Fogarty told FleetOwner. Combined with Bestpass' existing solutions, the company has taken one step closer to his vision of an end-to-end fleet management platform: "It's a single pane of glass for fleet executives to be able to view what's working and what's not and their overall program. So effectively, toll, tax, citations, all those things fold right into that visibility layer in those analytics to be able to get your arms around the challenges as quickly as possible."

CPSuite allows fleets to manage compliance documents and data. It automatically analyzes each driver and asset, creating work requests for anything that needs to be ordered or completed to ensure compliance and safety. Fleetworthy also employs subject matter experts to guide customers through the process. Advisors can even make recommendations to improve carriers' processes to achieve compliance more quickly and profitably, improving efficiency to future-proof those processes as the fleet scales up.

Bestpass, Fleetworthy complement each other's features and clientele

"We're like tight cousins," Fleetworthy President and CEO Michael Precia told FleetOwner. "We've been working with Bestpass for many, many years, so the datasets we understand. We built CPSuite to be an API base, very agnostic. Our customers are going to be able to leverage the value of both platforms very quickly.

"All of our customers are asking for us to be able to really give them meaningful driver scorecards, meaningful scorecards about their assets, and all this data put together gives us the ability to give them a 360-degree view of how they're doing from a risk perspective."

According to Precia, Fleetworthy has been able to compress the time it takes fleets to get drivers and assets compliant and on the road by 40%

"That's money dropped to the bottom line," he said. "Not having a good toll management program negatively impacts keeping that asset on the road as the jurisdictions start putting boots on trucks because you're not paying your tolls. So the calculator that we're going to be able to show our customers in regards to savings and optimization is pretty scary if you're trying to compete against us."

Fogarty expects customers to be able to use the integrated platform by year's end. Bestpass and Fleetworthy already have some of their joint customers beta testing the software, sharing data via the companies' existing partnership, so he said it's just a matter of scaling that up.

The CEOs also told FleetOwner that each other's customer bases complement one another. Bestpass is used in over 70 of the top 100 for-hire fleets today, and although they've begun working with customers such as Wal-Mart and Target, they don't have nearly as much penetration into the private fleet side. Likewise, Fleetworthy has been able to build a large private fleet customer base and has been expanding into the for-hire market. Combined, the companies will be able to serve broadly in both segments.

Because they are well-known in their markets, the two brands will continue to exist independently for now, according to Fogarty. Each company will keep its workforce of approximately 150 employees, for a combined total of 300.

"We were able to bring this together really, really quickly," Fogarty said. "In the interim, it's one corporate entity: Bestpass-Fleetworthy. And we'll be operating under those respective brands for the products that are well-known in our respective markets. To the extent we do anything different on branding, we'll do that with good advice down the road."

Bestpass has made new services available through other acquisitions and partnerships. In 2022, it acquired ExpressTruckTax. Earlier this year, the company partnered with Drivewyze, a weigh station bypass provider, to help fleets control toll costs. The Fleetworthy acquisition was enabled by a multi-million dollar investment in Bestpass by Insight Partners. According to Fogarty, it won't be the last.

"This won't be the end of the mergers and acquisitions activity that we have," Fogarty said. "There's an awful lot that we can do to expand out what's already a pretty comprehensive solution."