The Loadpay trucking-specific digital banking/payments application passed 8,000 carrier users in the months after the Mid-America Trucking Show. There, LoadPay President David Vielehr gave Overdrive a look at how the app's continued to evolve now more than a year into its relaunch under Triumph ownership.
Known most for its factoring service, the Triumph company's move into bona fide banking seeks to speed up secure payments from brokers to carriers, whether through a traditional factoring relationship or not, but also deliver on trucking industry-specific needs of small fleets and owner-operators.
Straight from a LoadPay account, carriers can:
- Load various fuel cards issued inside and out of the Triumph universe.
- Issue an expense card for another purpose right from the owner's account to a driver -- drivers can then add to an Apple or Google wallet to spend on maintenance, hotel rooms, food.
- Quickly access advance funds where available, as previously reported.
- Access spot-market rate intelligence.
- Manage automatic set-asides for specific business needs.
All are possible within the app for LoadPay account holders, and owner-operator Jamaar Bostick notes it's been a big help to him within the last year.
"I was going to part ways with Triumph last year" as his factoring company, he said, given some past disputes over loads he still hasn't seen payment for going back years now.
Triumph's factoring side wouldn't comment on the particulars of those outstanding payments, noting only "challenges related to external payment dynamics and inconsistencies in how funds were routed and settled across parties."
Last summer, though, Bostick found a reason to stick with Triumph: "They mixed in the LoadPay" service, said the Savannah, Georgia-based owner-operator, moving containers and dry van freight mostly regionally out of and into his home base. "It’s just that good. And I think they’re the only ones who have that type of service."
[Related: Time running out to compete for Overdrive's Small Fleet Champ awards: enter by July 31]
The look and feel of the app most owner-operators will find familiar, like a full-featured application from your bank but with owner-op-specific tools built in. Noted owner-operator Bostick, "it’s a banking app, yes. That's exactly what it is."
Other factoring companies, too, are delivering payments through the LoadPay network, LoadPay's Vielehr noted.
Owner-operator Bostick today runs all aspects of his business like he did when he had his own authority, yet he's leased as a second power unit to the authority of a fellow owner-operator. Limitations for his business receiving fast payments to his LoadPay account are relatively few, but include:
- Working with a new customer, a broker you've not used before and who's outside the universe of entities Triumph's approved for factoring? "It won't work," Bostick said.
- Likewise: If you don't have anything in your cash reserves, or a negative balance or a pending dispute with a particular broker.
Yet Jamaar Bostick lauds new tools within the app, particularly the savings set-asides, which he planned to utilize to prep for insurance and/or scheduled/emergency maintenance, speaking in May not long after the launch of that functionality.
David Vielehr said the LoadPay feature "came from carrier feedback: 'A couple times a year I have really big bills that come in that I need to be able to manage,'" like those insurance premiums, planned maintenance.
"Or building the emergency fund," Vielehr said. "Our team built the ability to create a 'subaccount'. Think of it like a savings envelope" common in old-school approaches. Any incoming deposit from a load, for instance, can be set to split off amounts into those envelopes for whatever purpose.
"Uptake on it has been pretty quick" among the client base of carriers, said Vielehr.
The LoadPay card is a direct-debit card for use of funds from an owner-operator's LoadPay account. Find the service website via this link. Owner-operator Bostick noted he utilizes a Triumph fuel card that's loaded easily from with the LoadPay application. David Vielehr flagged other fuel cards from RXO, TCS and others also easily loaded there.
At MATS, Vielehr showed Overdrive another tool that Bostick likewise found useful in outbound freight-rate averages and demand measurements broken out by segments and location from within the app, giving users a good feel for demand/potential pricing in a given area.
Down to the individual lane, Vielehr said. "We gave a carriers a way to see lane-rate data" starting last Fall. "We've seen good adoption there -- and good feedback from carriers."
Having potential revenue/rates data at your fingertips is convenient, but developers have been taking it a step farther, building ways for "carriers to manage their profit-and-loss" measures within the app, Vielehr added. "Carriers with insight into their expense profiles are always more profitable. You need to understand where you are in the month covering all your operating expense."
[Related: Overdrive's Load Profit Analyzer: Ways to use to assess rates, costs]
Functionality within LoadPay combines lane-rate data with any individual user's fixed and variable expense profile to give a window on "contribution margin," a measure of total revenues incoming minus just variable costs incurred. That’d be fuel, tires, maintenance generally, anything you spend to keep the equipment moving down the road to generate that revenue.
It can be particularly useful in load decision-making when you're stuck in or headed to a low-demand market. If you've already covered your fixed costs for a given month, for instance, you might afford to take that less-than-stellar load out of Florida to reposition in a better market if the rate's beating your variable expense measure per-mile -- or at the very least hitting it to cover the cost of running the power unit.
All the contribution margin earned after fixed expenses for the month are covered is pure profit.
"We have those tools available," Vielehr said, and "in the future those will be stitched together to provide those insights" more directly to LoadPay users.
Owner-operator Bostick's used the lane-rate data available for various purposes, particularly when he's "out in the middle of nowhere and you want to see what’s a hot area and what’s not," he said.
Long-term, Vielehr said the LoadPay team values user feedback, and will continue to deliver utility in a variety of ways, always with "freedom for carriers" in just how they utilize the tools available, he said. "Everybody starts their business for their own reasons. They might want to serve the community in a unique way, or build something to leave to their children."
When the LoadPay team first soft-launched the subaccounts savings envelopes in the app, the first carrier user to deposit funds in one gave the envelope a name that caught engineers' attention as they monitored the system for functionality.
"The first one created was named 'Hope,'" Vielehr said, simply put. Savings, he suspects, for a positive future.
[Related: Just how high has owner-ops' truck/trailer maintenance cost moved?]
