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Smart Charge · 16 July 2025 · 36 min

Ep. 17: Partnerschaften & Flotten‑Digitalisierung: Mit Katharina Fritsch von Shiftmove

Transcript

Cleaned up from a machine transcript. Translations are machine-generated and may contain errors.

Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy Podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, Founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

In this episode, I'm speaking with Katharina Fritsch, Head of Partnerships and Account Management at Shiftmove. Before joining Shiftmove, Katharina gained valuable experience at Enterprise, the well-known car rental company, and at Clever Shuttle, one of Germany's first electric vehicle-based ridepooling providers. Shiftmove combines real-time tracking, compliance tools, automated workflows and data analytics and is already used by over 18,000 companies to operate more than 550,000 vehicles daily. In our conversation, Katharina shares her experiences and the specific problems she solves with Shiftmove, what types of fleets she targets, how the

collaboration and cooperation within Shiftmove is progressing after the merger of Avos, Wimka and Optimum, how she views ESG and e-mobility as well as AI, and what's still being planned. So, let's get started with Katharina.

Hello, Katharina. Great to have you here today. How are you? Hello. Thanks for the invitation. I'm doing well, arrived here in good shape. Perfect. Wonderful, I'm glad. Before we really dive into detailed topics around Shiftmove and so on, can you perhaps bring the listeners up to speed and say: What's your background? How did you get to where you are now, in this role? Exactly. So, my name is known, I believe. Katharina Fritsch, I've been with the company Shiftmove for a good four years now.

After university I started in fleet management, I was at a large car rental company for about six, seven years, and made my first contacts in fleet management. Then I went to a large ridepooling provider for another three years, here in Berlin, and got to experience what it's like to almost completely build up and scale a fleet – from 30, 40, 50 vehicles up to 500 to 600 vehicles in the fleet. All purely electric, actually. It was a very exciting time. What years was that? That

was 2018 until the COVID period in 2021. Pretty early for there to be that much electric already. It was actually very challenging, but I think we managed it very well. And then I joined Shiftmove – so from the user side, from the software user side, I switched to the software side. One step back: How did you get into this fleet world at all? What fascinated or motivated you about it? Or did you just stumble into it? Well, I have to say, I've

had a bit of contact with cars and mobility since childhood.

Due to family reasons, there was always an affinity for vehicles somewhere in the family, and then after university I actually got into it by chance, because a friend of mine worked at the car rental company and said: "Hey, it's so much fun. Why don't you try it too?" I was there for about seven years. And what did you like so much about that car rental company and then at the ridesharing that you've now

been in this industry for so long? Well, at the car rental company it was actually the case that I started quite classically as a management trainee. I had a very generalist approach there, you could get a taste of all company areas – whether vehicle dispatch, customer service or sales. You somehow picked up all abilities and skills. I thought that was very good to first get a broad foundation. And of course you still had the vehicle topic parallel to that. It was also nice, of course, to see and drive different vehicles every day

and get a feel for the cars. And how did the step to the next career phase come about? If you also want to say the names of the companies. Yes, of course. I can gladly say the car rental company, that was the company Enterprise, and the ridepooling provider was the company Clever Shuttle – I think also known here in Berlin, the green cars that drove around here. How did you then get from Enterprise to Clever Shuttle?

Also by chance, through friendship, acquaintance – as it happens, you talk in your circle of friends about what you're doing. And they were actually looking for someone at the time to take over the whole fleet management topic, because they had founded this tech start-up here in Berlin for the ridepooling service. In the end it was a fortunate coincidence. After seven years I also said, time for something new – it was super exciting to be able to accompany the project. And then I switched.

And that was your first contact point with e-mobility then, actually? Yes, at Enterprise there wasn't much yet. And then it was basically already 100 percent electric vehicles from the start. Exactly, that was also the business model: you base everything on electromobility, sustainable mobility, the ridepooling concept, that several people share one vehicle. And that's why they did it with electric vehicles and also with hydrogen vehicles. And how do you look back on these two experiences? What are topics that for you

that stuck with you, right? Insights when you look back. Actually, I look back very, very positively. The time at CleverShuttle was, I think, very formative, also regarding the topic of fleet management, how you scale processes, make them scalable in the fleet, and design that sustainably so it can be scaled up quickly. And electric mobility that early, I can imagine that wasn't easy. Do you still remember challenges that you had to overcome? Yes, there were actually many challenges. For one thing

when you scale the fleet like that. We started in Berlin back then – I'd have to lie now – with 20 to 30 vehicles and then brought that to somewhere around 100 vehicles. Then you naturally run into one challenge or another with charging and load management, especially at that time, because many parking garages simply weren't designed to handle such loads in the end. So you had to find people and locations yourselves where there was enough power available for

charging, in other words. Well, we were very lucky that we had a parking garage and a landlord who cooperated very well. That allowed us to electrify relatively quickly and also provide the capacity accordingly, and then through intelligent smart load management – after all, not all cars need to charge at the same time. That way it always distributed itself quite well. Cool. And did the vehicles always suffice in terms of the range you needed for the

entire ridepooling needs of the users or customers? That's actually a very good, very valid question. We all know the first electric vehicles didn't have great range yet. But I have to say, for Berlin city traffic it actually sufficed, so we always managed quite well with it. Of course in summer and winter there were one or two challenges regarding air conditioning or heating. But we got that under control quite well too, I think. I don't know if you were still

there, but to my knowledge CleverShuttle was acquired by Deutsche Bahn. And then they made a big pivot in terms of the business model, and then didn't just offer ridepooling directly to end users, but did that with the public transport players in the various cities. And then I believe last year or two years ago the company had to file for insolvency. Yes, maybe you can say: Where were you then? At which point did you switch to Avrios? And how do you look back

on that development? Exactly. So I switched to Avrios in November 2021. By then we had actually already downsized a large part of the fleet due to Corona. GHT Mobility, which was or is behind CleverShuttle, then changed the business model in that they went more towards this last mile. That was always the approach to say: We cover the last mile, basically from the train station to home. But now they're more into offering mobility for the public

sector in the context of tenders and are also more active in rural areas. Exactly. And then I switched to Avrios in November 2021. And Avrios – can you give us a brief introduction? What was it about? What's the company like? How did it establish itself? And what problems do you solve? Exactly. I'd maybe start with why I switched to Avrios. Namely, at CleverShuttle we had actually always used Avrios as fleet management software. That means

when I started there, I basically built up and expanded all the processes and structures with the software and was always a fan of the software. And then at some point it came about to say: Okay, you're actually switching sides – from the pure user and operational side into software sales, by now. And what was this software about? What are the problems that the software solves? So basically we try to solve as many everyday problems of fleet managers as possible

starting with collecting the data pool in the fleet, then to operational processes like damage management, invoice processing, fine processing, driver's license checks, workplace safety inspections. So we also cover the whole compliance topic. So a digitisation of all the processes that a fleet unfortunately needs around the vehicle. Exactly. Then there was a certain history in the company. Maybe you can also add what the company's milestones were up to now. Exactly. So we now operate under the name Shift Move.

That means the companies Avrios and Vimcar merged about two years ago under the name Shift Move. Vimcar, certainly known to some, founded in 2013 here in Berlin, known for digital logbooks and geotracking. Avrios then as a great complement to that with the fleet management software. And at the end of last year we actually also brought the company Optimum Automotive in France into the Shift Move family. And Optimum – how does that fit together? You explained Vimcar quite well I think, and Optimum Automotive is

Especially relevant for the French market, as it also covers fleet management and geotracking. Now I've understood correctly: all those brands, those companies that have joined together, are now called Shiftmove. Exactly. Okay. Yes, it's sometimes not so easy to understand from the outside, but that was quite clear, I think. And what are your roles within Shiftmove then? What are your responsibilities, or what's currently occupying you as a team? Right. So I'm now responsible for the areas of Customer Success, Account Management and Partnerships.

And what's occupying me at the moment? We actually have many topics, especially on the fleet side the topic of AI in fleet management, artificial intelligence. How can we make our product even smarter to ultimately deliver even greater value to the user? Then clearly the topic of cost pressure. I think everyone's feeling that right now. Many fleets are currently under enormous cost pressure. How can we also help make costs visible? And then personally I'd like to grow the team a bit more,

so have a bit more man- or woman-power behind it. And what are the ideas you see for AI use cases? How can you imagine that? We're actually already using AI in the software. In ARos, several areas are already covered with AI, whether it's automatic invoice reading or fine management that runs completely AI-supported. But we actually have many more ideas to make it even smarter, for example with a mail room, so to speak, in the

inbox, where I simply throw in all my documents and the software assigns them – whether it's a fine notice, whether it's an invoice, whether it's a damage case – and automatically sorts them to the individual vehicles. Yes, cool. And regarding team growth: what are the challenges you're facing? Yes, I'm actually looking for support in all teams, because we're actually growing as a company as well. Correspondingly, we naturally also need more support in the individual teams, and yes, I would just like

to get one or two more people with subject matter expertise into the team as well, to be able to deliver even greater value to our customers. Okay. Yes, then those listening and perhaps looking around – that's an opportunity. And on the topic of cost pressure: can you explain which three main cost factors are perhaps particularly concerning the fleet managers you speak with? Generally, you notice that fleet management is a very underestimated area in most companies. As we see it, it's actually the second highest

cost factor. After personnel costs comes cars and fleet management quite quickly, but it receives relatively little attention. We also see that in the area of digitalisation. Currently, only a third, a quarter of fleets are actually fully digitalised. The rest work completely manually – Excel, paper and pen. And because of that, costs are actually super non-transparent. Then the question is always: where can I save costs in my fleet? And as a fleet manager, I actually don't see it at all. What we actually see as

the biggest cost drivers at the moment: firstly leasing costs, but then also damages, damage management and insurance costs, which can very quickly drive up the costs of a fleet. And with leasing costs – can you give an example of how you would then have a solution to prevent these costs from being so high? Sure, gladly. What we see is that many fleets aren't aware of how user behaviour is. So: my company car user – how many kilometres does he really drive per year? Often a rough estimate is made

both by the driver and by the fleet manager. And then you simply conclude a leasing contract for the next three years with x kilometres. Sometimes the driving behaviour then changes, and many fleet managers don't know it or simply miss adjusting or optimising the leasing contract accordingly, so that you don't end up with too many or too few kilometres and incur costs from that. And are we talking about the very large fleets that would have something like that, or also smaller ones? How can you imagine

how large the companies would need to be approximately, or the fleet size? So actually with ARos as fleet management software, we address fleets from around 20 vehicles onwards. We say that there's already a certain return on investment there, so that the investment in software simply pays off. And then open end – we actually also have very large fleets in our portfolio. And Vimcar actually as a digital logbook from one vehicle onwards – there I already have a cost saving. Exactly. And just for understanding, because there are

software systems that you would also use from one person and then scale up to very large. I'm thinking of a folder system, a Dropbox or similar – there are various software systems. Why is it with you that you don't target a fleet with one vehicle? What are the hurdles, why aren't you realistic for very small fleets? Generally, smaller fleets can of course also obtain the software from us.

I wouldn't rule that out at this point. But of course it's also important that we can demonstrate: where is the added value of the software at the end of the day? And of course we also have a subscription model. That means I pay a fee per vehicle per month. And I think anyone who has maybe 12 vehicles in their fleet still has a relatively good overview – either with an Excel spreadsheet or with a folder system. When is my next service? When is my next MOT? What's the damage situation? Which insurance do I have?

But when I get into more vehicles, it actually does become more confusing. Exactly, that you easily lose overview beyond a certain number of vehicles. That's the big problem, so to speak. With smaller fleets you could perhaps still do it manually. Exactly, I understand. Now it's the case that as a woman you're unfortunately actually in a male-dominated industry. And I wonder: what experiences have you had there? What has particularly shaped you, or what do you think – how should

one change that? Could one change it so that there are more women in the fleet industry? Well, I can honestly say for myself that I actually don't perceive it that way at all. Honestly, because throughout my entire career I've actually always been surrounded by women or worked in mixed teams and not exclusively only worked with men. And even now in the team I actually also have two female team leads and one male team lead. So it's actually very

mixed with us as well. Therefore I personally don't perceive it that way at all and rather think that one shows: if you approach something with competence and passion, then you shouldn't distinguish between man or woman. Exactly. Well, that's good. And regarding – now you've joined together, all these companies. How does such a cooperation work? How can one imagine it when three companies with perhaps different cultures come together? That's not always easy. Can you

give insights there, also how that works in practice? Yes, well I have to say that the products themselves complement each other brilliantly. With Avrios as a fleet management software we naturally cover a completely different area than with Vimcar – digital logbook – and Optimum actually then for the French market. And purely in terms of how the teams also complement each other, I believe that both we at Vimcar and Avrios are very similar in terms of corporate culture. We've actually only had Optimum since last year and also for the –

you also mentioned that not that many fleets are digitised yet. In your view, what is a challenge, or what are arguments that one could give fleets to get them to digitise – as the first question – and then as the second question: how can one also reach these fleets so that they adopt a digitalised solution? It's a very good question. I think currently we're seeing a generational change in fleet management. That means, on the one hand we're reaching

many fleets precisely because this generational change is taking place – rather younger fleet managers taking over who have an affinity for digitalisation and also understand that with software you can make many processes simpler. How do we reach the fleets? That is actually a good and also difficult question. We try to create a lot of content and engage fleets through webinars by explaining many topics around fleet management and thereby simply also offering added value. But we're

naturally also present at trade fairs and events and try to do a lot of networking. There are – yes, there are – that's where we also met last time, at the Flotte event. There are good events where many fleet managers gather. Indeed, yes. And we've talked a bit about the past and already teased AI a little. But where do you see Shift Move in the next five years? Where is the journey heading? Yes, ultimately our vision is – we

always call it building a one-stop-shop solution for anyone who has a fleet of any kind, and that everyone finds the right product with us. So really from the small fleet – as I said – maybe 20 vehicles, who perhaps doesn't need the comprehensive software with all solutions, right up to the large fleet that has many different processes and many different structures, that everyone can basically put together their own product and Shift Move ultimately becomes the point of contact for the fleet manager where they can also solve all their everyday challenges

as well. One thing we perhaps haven't clarified yet: when you talk about fleets, are those mainly company cars, passenger cars, or also trucks or buses? Do you have a certain target group that you exclude, or are all vehicle types relevant? Well, we definitely don't want to exclude anyone. Generally the core business, as it has grown, is actually the classic company car fleets. But what we're seeing is that we also have many functional fleets. So, I'd say

classic delivery service. But we also have customers – this is always my favourite example – who manage street sweepers, who manage boats. So everything that somehow relates to the topic of mobility. Company bicycles, job bikes can actually be recorded in our software. Interesting. Aircraft not, I assume. You could actually record a special vehicle as well, but it's then very niche and I don't think the right use case with an aircraft. And the topic of ESG was also prominent in recent years, with the supply chain act also in the news. How do you look at

on the ESG topic? Actually very relaxed, because basically all our fleets can report in ESG-compliant fashion. This is primarily about electric mobility, vehicle consumption, CO2 reporting. And in fact we have ready-made reports for our fleet managers that they can pull for any time period they want to analyse. So our fleets are ESG-compliant in that regard. Oh yes, cool. So basically the emission values per vehicle are then simply extracted once from the software. Interesting. Yes, e-mobility – you already mentioned it – that's also a focus

of this podcast. We also have the topic of charging. Electric mobility is about the vehicles, but of course also about charging and energy. How do you look at the topic? And what's on your mind there? What do you also see with fleets, do you already offer solutions there? Yes, of course fleet managers can also manage electric vehicles in our system. They can also report on them, as we just talked about, do ESG reporting there, see what my actual consumption per electric vehicle is, whether employees are charging

relatively much or little. Exactly. Otherwise we actually see that fleet electrification is progressing quite well. Currently 11% of fleets are electrified with us. What's actually missing is electrification in the truck segment too. We see relatively few fleets leading by example there right now. Do you mean 11% of all fleets have at least one electric vehicle? Or is it 11% of the total number of vehicles being managed that are electric? 11% of the total number are electric. Exactly. Interesting. And

is there also a difference between fleet size? Can you generally say that the larger the fleet, the higher the electric mobility share? I think it depends very much on the company and the business model they have. We see that many company car fleets are now moving more and more towards purely electric vehicles. Of course there are targets there too. Especially when we talk to large fleets, they say they want to try by 2030 to provide every employee with an electric vehicle as comprehensively as

possible. Exactly. The targets are getting closer. 2030 isn't that far away anymore. And are there also geographical differences? You don't just have Germany as a market, I believe. Do you already see differences between countries? Actually we see that in France for example the sustainability topic is being pushed a bit more, currently in Germany rather less at the moment. But we're just watching what the next funding programmes bring and whether we'll then get

more momentum on electric mobility in Germany again. It's also the case, if I'm not mistaken, that in some countries company cars aren't really that much of a thing – I believe even less so in the USA than in Europe or Germany. Company cars are much more widespread in Germany especially. Would that then also be an exclusion criterion or difficult for you to enter markets where there are fewer company cars? Generally we can say that we now also have customers, especially international companies,

who use it in an international context, actually have operations in America and South America where they manage vehicles. But yes, it's not our core business now. The software actually works there too though. Okay. Yes, and then the software topic again asked a bit more specifically. There's data, there are integrations, interfaces perhaps with partners, analytics. What role does that play for you? What kind of challenges are those? Maybe you can also give examples. Well we naturally try to connect a lot of data as

well. The newest product we now have meanwhile is that we get direct vehicle data into the software too. Currently the first data point is mileage – from our perspective the most important KPI in fleet management, because against mileage I can measure all costs, make cost per kilometre visible. And from newer vehicles we now meanwhile get the data once a day directly from the vehicle into the software. So that's the beginning now, and then you want to collect even more data points

over time. Well the data points themselves are already there. The manufacturers deliver that. Now it's actually up to us to make the data points visible to the fleet manager. Do you see any specific challenges with electric mobility for fleets to go electric? Are those also topics you support, namely the charging topic? Or there are certainly also use cases that you – also from your history with the ridepooling approach – where you see there's more, with

company cars there's more electric share because it's simpler than now a carsharer. Or are those topics you also look at? What we see is that many fleets are naturally keen to electrify, but then keep running into the challenge: where does my employee charge at home? Especially in major cities. Or how is billing regulated? So if the employee charges at home, perhaps at a private wallbox – how can I make visible which vehicle was charged there? Is it the

Company car? Is it a private vehicle? How do I get the data transferred back into a system? These are actually topics that concern us as well. We can already make it visible, sometimes a bit bumpy, but at least in a way that customers can then evaluate it. And last but not least, because this podcast is called Smart Charge: How do you see the topic of smart charging or even bidirectional charging like V2G, what potential you would have if you manage a large fleet and perhaps not only optimise those costs that

you mentioned, but actually also generate revenue with these vehicles, where batteries are lying dormant and then in future you can earn money with them. Well, currently, I have to be honest, we haven't really dealt with that in depth yet. That will certainly come. Yes, certainly, there are still challenges there. You can also listen to some other episodes we've recorded to dive deeper into the challenge. And I'm also

personally of the opinion that it will come soon, of course. And before we say goodbye, do you want to point the listeners to something special? How they can reach you and perhaps stay in touch if they're interested in learning more. Exactly. So anyone who's interested in Shiftmove is of course warmly invited to attend one of our webinars. We actually have live webinars every two weeks on a wide variety of topics – just take a look. And otherwise you can actually find me on LinkedIn, write to me

anytime. And then I'd be happy to get in touch with one or another and continue the exchange. Then thank you so much, Katharina, it was a great pleasure. And I wish you a wonderful weekend. Thanks for the invitation. My pleasure.

And that was the episode with Katharina Fritsch. I found her background particularly fascinating, that she's been in the fleet industry for so long and especially that she shaped e-mobility so early – already in 2018 with Clever Shuttle – and also had challenges with electrical installation and how they solved that back then with smart energy management when scaling the electric fleet. And then how she switched from being a user of Fleetops and Shiftmove to working there, and especially how many fleets they already serve

and what expansion plans they still have, and how sensible all these digitalisation approaches actually are when you consider that a lot is still done with Excel and paper in the age of AI. There's still a lot of potential for cost savings, and of course in e-mobility there are many levers too. There's definitely still a lot planned. You can tell that Shiftmove is very active when it comes to new services and new plans and new geographies they want to tackle. I hope you enjoyed the episode.

And if so, feel free to check out what Katharina recommended regarding the webinars, or connect with her and give us five stars. Until the next conversation.

Episode notes

In dieser Episode spreche ich mit Katharina Fritsch, Head of Partnerships & Account Management bei Shiftmove, über ihren Werdegang und die Zukunft der Fuhrparkbranche. Katharina blickt zurück auf ihre Erfahrungen bei Enterprise und CleverShuttle – einem der ersten E-Pooling-Anbieter in Deutschland – und erklärt, wie sie bei Shiftmove komplexe Herausforderungen löst. Wir sprechen darüber, - welche Fuhrparks besonders von Echtzeit-Tracking, Compliance-Tools und automatisierten Workflows profitieren, - wie sich die Zusammenarbeit nach dem Zusammenschluss von Avrios, Vimcar und Optimum entwickelt, - welche Rolle ESG, E-Mobilität und KI in der modernen Flottensteuerung spielen, - und welche Expansions- und Digitalisierungspläne Shiftmove als Plattform-Allrounder verfolgt. Ob Excel- und Papier-Tickets endlich der Vergangenheit angehören und wo die größten Kostensenkungs- und Effizienzhebel liegen – Katharina gibt praxisnahe Einblicke und Inspiration für alle, die ihre Flotte digital und nachhaltig optimieren wollen.