Ayvens integrates and digitizes for sustainable mobility

With a growing middle class – worldwide – the demand for mobility is also increasing. Combine mobility with modern technology, and you can move smarter, safer, faster, and cleaner. Much of this is multimodal – choosing the mode of transport that best suits the situation – and increasingly it is also on-demand. Additionally, ownership is increasingly being replaced by usage. For Leaseplan, the largest leasing company in the Netherlands, innovation and digitization are therefore essential.

Mobility providers who want to survive must not only focus on scaling up but also on agility and digitization, so that you can easily collaborate on platforms. This also applies to leasing companies like Leaseplan.

Leaseplan was founded in 1963; in May 2023, the company was acquired by the French ALD Automotive, a part of the French Société Générale. Both Leaseplan and ALD have an annual revenue of about 10 billion euros. Together, with 3.4 million cars under management, they are the largest independent leasing company in the world. In 2024, both companies will continue under a new name, Ayvens, initially in the countries where they are jointly active.

As interim CTO at Leaseplan, Marco van Velthoven is responsible for engineering and development. He reflects on the period leading up to the acquisition of Leaseplan by ALD. At that time, Leaseplan (with 6,500 employees in 28 countries) had a very ambitious innovation agenda for a global ‘business-driven’ digital transformation.

The company had to put its best foot forward to maintain its lead as the largest business mobility service provider, Van Velthoven explains. “Platform providers and OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) were very interested in the revenue model in this market – these are often players who have not built up any legacy. We wanted to move from a federal model with local IT systems to a global digital platform based on standards, headless applications, and an API-first strategy. This platform also needed to become the home base for all parts of Leaseplan. To achieve this transformation, our development capacity had to increase quickly.”

In the period leading up to the acquisition by ALD, Leaseplan significantly scaled up its development capacity: from 200 to 800 employees. This is all development capacity, ranging from .NET, React, Sitecore, and Java to Salesforce, SAP, Pega, and various support tools.

If you want to grow quickly, you can try to pull talent from the market yourself, but you can also seek collaboration with strategic partners. Leaseplan’s sourcing strategy is aimed at spreading risks across different suppliers. One of the partners Van Velthoven chose was NetRom. “I already knew NetRom from a previous employer. And although we didn’t work with NetRom there, the company left a very good impression on me. What particularly stayed with me from that first impression was the pragmatism. The people at NetRom are eager to help you and prefer to focus on fun technical things; the company is quite flat and transparent.”

The collaboration with NetRom started just before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. “That proceeded pragmatically,” says Van Velthoven. “I indicated what developers I needed. NetRom said they could deliver, and then I connected NetRom to our product organization. There was then intensive coordination. What are the requirements? How are we going to do it? Initially, our product owners found it quite challenging to work remotely with NetRom’s developers.” But when the pandemic broke out, those objections quickly disappeared.

Leaseplan engaged NetRom to provide support in specific areas. “Think of developing an application that can be used by account managers when they are in direct contact with the customer to shape sustainable mobility. These are applications that are essential for today’s business. NetRom performs work in both development and management. We have people in roles such as project manager, product owner, and scrum master. We started working in sprints with daily stand-ups and reviews.”

Due to the acquisition of Leaseplan by ALD, priorities have temporarily shifted to integrating the two companies. This integration, which should be completed by mid-2026, is particularly complex because Leaseplan is more than just a leasing company: the company also has a banking license. And ALD is publicly listed through Société Générale. Therefore, in different regions, integration is prioritized over further innovation and renewal. As a result, the development capacity has been partially and temporarily scaled down.

“We now have a small core team left, consisting of a scrum master and four developers at NetRom, who are part of a larger, hybrid team. Many applications are now in ‘maintenance mode’. After the integration, the transformation will continue. High on the agenda are innovations such as artificial intelligence, data-driven retention programs, and ‘proactive maintenance and routing’ – synonymous with pushing customers to a specific garage.”

Learning from Each Other

Despite the integration that has ‘come in between,’ the collaboration with NetRom has remained stable, says Van Velthoven. He has a clear view of this collaboration. “For NetRom, it was not new to work with a large international player where there is not only a lot of happening but where things like code reviews, peer reviews, and screening of all employees are simply required. In our business, governance and audits play an important role, such as a stringent software development lifecycle process or penetration testing. For NetRom developers, it is undoubtedly interesting to work with the latest technologies and tools.”

Leaseplan has also learned from the collaboration. “We always had a fairly traditional division in development roles: a front-end developer is a front-end developer, and we also had specialists for user experience and the back end. Unlike us, NetRom works from a full-stack approach. NetRom works with T-shaped professionals who can keep up well in different areas: skilled in front-end, back-end, and database management. If we had stuck to that functional distinction in the collaboration, we would have needed a much larger team. NetRom’s full-stack approach makes the peer review process easier; it goes faster, and there are fewer handovers needed.”

Leaseplan has also learned a lot in the area of talent development. “NetRom brings in young people and invests heavily in development, engagement, and a good environment. The result is that employees stay on board for a long time. You also need eager junior employees to get the work done; a team made up of only ‘Messi’s’ does not necessarily make the team better. For example, we have also replaced expensive external staff with young graduates in our marketing technology and data domains. You do need to invest in coaching and mentoring to nurture that talent. We have now included the responsibility for this in the objectives and job requirements of our seniors. Employing young people, supervised by senior developers, has had no negative impact on achieving our objectives. Moreover, I consider it a fundamental value to help people in their development. The right professionals are happy to share knowledge.”

“We are currently busy with the integration of the companies: technology and people,” says Van Velthoven. “NetRom now plays a crucial role in maintaining and keeping specific customer-facing applications running. It’s always good to have a flexible layer. In doing so, we see NetRom as a partner for the future. We are very satisfied with the costs, the people, and the attitude.”

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