LEX AUTOLEASE: The jewel in the crown
Date:
17 December 2013
Developments at Lex: LCVs and salary sacrifice
As part of its efforts to reel in more customers from new areas of the marketplace, Lex has a series of new initiatives on the way, specifically in the light commercial vehicle and salary sacrifice arenas.
Chief executive Tim Porter describes the latter as less of a new product and more of a communications task: "I think the salary sacrifice opportunity is relatively well-known, relatively well-trailed. I do wonder whether the industry and those in it have actually properly explained that to potential users.
"Those firms that we are working with in our customer base now have seen a massive uptick in the engagement of colleagues in the business, who think the firm has done them a real positive turn by using its leverage to get access to vehicles that are quite well-priced and so on, and making them available to members of staff who previously wouldn't have access to that. Financially, it works particularly well for low-emissions vehicles.
"One of the unforeseen spin-offs [of salary sacrifice schemes] is that the firm could be contributing quite positively to efficient vehicles being on the UK roads - almost by accident. This is all about communication - this is not news - and I think the leasing industry could do more business as a consequence of this."
As for its LCV offering, Porter reveals a much more product-focussed plan from Lex: "A typical SME is not desperately interested in fleet management, [so we will be] pre-fitting vehicles that do what an electrician needs to have done. We're doing some work in that area at the moment - can we almost have off-the-shelf, in the way you might order a car off-the-shelf, pre-fitted out with the sort of racking and shelving and fixtures and fittings that a typical electrician, plumber, construction business might want?
"They don't want to come in and build a bespoke vehicle and, frankly, we can't service one vehicle, but could we have a number of vehicles that are already pre-prepared to meet that market requirement.
"We've not done this in glorious isolation - we've done this in partnership with electricians and people that work in these sectors giving us views and feedback on what they think the vehicle should have in it."
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