Relay Payments now has the travel center trio after TA deal

In ice hockey, a hat trick is when a player scores three goals in a game. (Same thing in soccer).

Relay Payments now can declare a hat trick at the big three travel centers, as an announcement of a deal this week puts the digital payments provider into Travel Centers of America (TA) and its affiliates, the last of the big three that did not accept Relay’s services.

The deal with TA comes a little more than a year after Relay Payments signed up Love’s Travel Centers. It already had Pilot Flying J (NYSE: BRK-B) in the fold as an outlet that accepts the Relay Payments digital payment network.

Relay CEO Ryan Droege, in an interview with FreightWaves, did not use the term “virtuous circle” to describe what happens as the Relay Payments network grows. But what he said would fall under that definition.

With the larger number of outlets, Droege said, “we now have a bigger nationwide fueling network and can support fleets of any size that are looking for a more modern digital and fraud free payment experience.”

Droege said internal estimates at Relay Payments is that the company covers about 85% of high flow diesel sales following the TA deal, with a “handful of more announcements” coming up that will boost it to 90%.”

There is a “snowball effect,” Droege said. As a fleet looks to the various ways it can purchase fuel, the broader network at Relay makes it more attractive. That effect comes, he said, “as you continue to build out more robust retail locations in support of larger and larger fleets.”

Relay Payments signed up Circle K in September as a customer. At the time, Circle K became the third largest company accepting Relay Payments behind Pilot and Love’s.

Droege said that Circle K’s approximately 500 outlets are more than the roughly 300 outlets at TA. “From a location count, TA has fewer, but they’ve been doing it for a lot longer,”: Droege said. “So from a volume standpoint, it is higher.”

TA is not accepting Relay Payments for maintenance at its outlets. “We hope to continue to work on the maintenance side over time,” Droege said.

One barrier to bringing on the maintenance divisions of some of Relay’s customers is that they might share the same name as the better-known retailer, but can have significant differences in technology and even ownership. “It’s not that anybody doesn’t want to do it,” Droege said. “It’s just an order of operations in terms of the complexity and the technology integration.”

For example, despite the highly-touted Love’s acceptance of Relay, Droege said Love’s Truck Care does not yet accept Relay.

With the big 3 travel centers under contract, as well as Circle K, Droege said signing up more maintenance outlets will be “the focus of the next big growth area.”

“It’s a very exciting milestone, to kind of reach the mountain top of the big three,” Droege said. “We still have a lot of value we can bring to fleets elsewhere, so we’re going to continue to push in other areas that our customers ask for. Repair and maintenance is a big one.”

Payments for fuel, DEF, maintenance and other necessary services on the road traditionally had been provided by a bevy of services, ranging from paper checks to credit cards, all with their own drawbacks. Relay Payments is app-based, which the company has touted as drastically reducing the opportunities for fraud.

“When you take a transaction and make it digital, it kind of becomes programmable,” Droege said. “You can do a lot more things around fraud and security controls. You can get a lot more granular on the metadata around the payment, which means your back office becomes more efficient, whether it’s on the accounts payable or the accounts receivable side. There’s just a lot of inefficiencies that are in and around payments and more. We drive that out as we transition to digital. It just ultimately helps the carrier’s bottom line and their operating margin.”

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