Dive Brief:

• FleetCor Technologies, now known as Corpay, and the CEO of the business, Ronald Clarke, have agreed to pay $100 million to settle an administrative action with the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged the company cost tens of thousands of customers hundreds of millions of dollars in undisclosed fees.
• The FTC, which sued FleetCor in federal court in 2019 over the fees, said it now has a court-approved order that will allow customers to recoup some funds, according to a press release from the agency on Thursday. A spokesperson for the Atlanta-based company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
• “FleetCor deceived its small business customers by promising fuel savings that never materialized, while unfairly charging them hidden and unauthorized fees,” the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Christopher Mufarrige said in the release.

Dive Insight:

The publicly-traded company, which changed its name in 2024, reported $4.5 billion in revenue last year and has about 11,000 employees. In addition to fuel cards, Corpay also provides cross-border payment, accounts payable and commercial card services.

The commission voted to accept the settlement that was hashed out in federal court with one commissioner voting for it, and one recused, according to the release. That’s a result of there being only two active Republican members of the commission at this time, with three seats empty. The vote took place Thursday, according to an FTC spokesperson.

The 2019 lawsuit against FleetCor resulted in litigation that has been unfolding for years.The FTC alleged that the company lured business clients to its fuel cards with "false or unsubstantiated claims," including that they would save money, benefit from fraud controls and incur no "set-up, transaction, or membership fees."

FleetCor’s clients were misled into paying the “undisclosed fees in connection with their use of fuel cards that FleetCor falsely promised businesses would save them money,” according to the FTC’s release. The lawsuit referenced customer gripes about the fees reaching back to 2015.

FleetCor would impose unwarranted late fees, didn’t disclose certain fees and obscured fees by waiting several billing cycles to impose them, all of which saddled customers with unexpected costs, the FTC said. The customers that were bilked were often small businesses, the federal agency noted.

In August 2022, the U.S. District Court for Northern Georgia granted summary judgment to the FTC on all five counts against the company, and found Clarke individually liable. The judge presiding in the case also granted injunctive relief. Clarke was also found by the court to have deceived customers.

FleetCor appealed the case to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023, but in January of this year mainly lost that bid to overturn the ruling.

The appellate court upheld the lower court’s summary judgment against the company and affirmed the permanent injunction. The appellate court only partially upheld the judgment against Clarke and dropped the injunction against him, but as part of the FTC settlement, the CEO agreed not to oppose reimposition of the injunction against him.

The court order now prohibits Corpay from imposing fees on customers unless it obtains “the customer’s express informed consent” after providing “clear and unavoidable information about the charge,” according to the release. It also bans the company from “making deceptive claims about its fuel cards,” the release said.