ryd, the Munich-based mobility payments company, has launched ryd fleet in collaboration with Mastercard, expanding from its consumer base into the European B2B fleet market. ryd was founded in Munich in 2014 and operates Europe's largest cross-brand mobile payment network at fuel pumps, with more than one million consumer users across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Benelux, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. The platform is natively integrated into Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Skoda infotainment systems, and strategic investors include BP, Mercedes-Benz, AXA, and Mastercard.
With ryd fleet, drivers pay for fuel, EV charging, car washes, and other vehicle expenses through the ryd app or directly through their vehicle's infotainment system, using a tokenised virtual Mastercard. Acceptance follows Mastercard's commercial card network across Europe, which is significantly broader than the closed-loop networks traditional fleet cards rely on. The app captures receipts, odometer readings, and trip details at the point of payment. Fleet managers get a portal with near real-time transaction data and spend controls by category, driver, or vehicle. The physical fleet card is removed from the flow entirely.
How does this change fleet payments?
Traditional European fleet cards (e.g., DKV or UTA) work as closed-loop or semi-closed-loop networks. Drivers carry physical cards that work only within the issuer's partner network, expense reporting occurs through manual receipt collection, and the data lag between transactions and fleet manager visibility can be days. ryd fleet replaces the physical card with a tokenised virtual card that runs on Mastercard's commercial rails. The driver experience shifts from "pull out the right fuel card for this station" to "the car or the app handles the payment automatically." For fleet managers, the data becomes near real-time and structured at the point of capture, with odometer and trip details attached directly to the transaction rather than reconstructed from receipts later.
From consumer payments to B2B
ryd is not a non-financial brand that added a payment product, since payments have been ryd's core product since 2014. Nevertheless, solutions like ryd in the mobility and fuel payments space have traces of Embedded Finance. And the more interesting question is how a consumer payments business graduates into B2B. The consumer app proved the in-car payment behaviour. The OEM integrations gave ryd distribution into millions of vehicles, and the existing service station relationships gave ryd acceptance density. Now ryd is applying all three to fleet, which is a market segment with very different economics: B2B customers buy in volume, sign multi-year contracts, and value data and controls as much as acceptance. Furthermore, Mastercard is not a new partner, as it has been a strategic investor in ryd since 2020. What is new is the application of Mastercard's commercial card infrastructure (virtual cards, spend controls, B2B tokenisation) to the ryd platform. Therefore, the ryd-Mastercard model is worth watching for other consumer mobility platforms in Europe that may eventually want to graduate to B2B in similar ways.
