On the desk today · Corpay
The driver swipes the card. The accountant approves the invoice. The hotel confirms the booking. Corpay collects in the middle of all three.
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The Invisible Fee on
Every Business Expense
In 2000, a former ADP executive named Ron Clarke founded a company in Atlanta with a thesis that sounded unglamorous but was quietly brilliant: businesses spend money every day — on fuel, on supplies, on travel, on vendor payments — and the act of spending is messy. The receipts pile up. The invoices don’t match. The drivers overfill the tank. The expense reports arrive late. Clarke saw that the process of corporate spending — the space between the company and the vendor — was full of friction. And where there is friction, there is a fee.
He called the company FleetCor. It started with fleet fuel cards — plastic cards issued to truck drivers that replaced cash and personal credit cards at the gas pump. The card controlled what the driver could buy, where, and how much. It gave the fleet manager data. It gave the accountant a clean transaction. And it gave FleetCor a fee on every fill-up — a small percentage of the transaction, paid by the fuel merchant, invisible to the driver.
I manage a team that travels. Last month, one of my colleagues booked a hotel through our corporate travel system. She didn’t think about who processed the payment. But between her booking and the hotel’s confirmation sat a company that matched the reservation, verified the rate, processed the payment, and collected a fee for doing it. That company was Corpay. I checked our fleet fuel cards last week — the ones our delivery drivers use at gas stations across three states. Every swipe generates a transaction. Every transaction generates a fee. Corpay collects it. We never see it on the receipt.
In March 2024, FleetCor rebranded as Corpay — a name that better reflected what the company had become. It was no longer just a fleet card business. It had expanded into three segments that together cover the full spectrum of corporate payments. Vehicle Payments — the original fleet fuel card business — still anchors the company, generating roughly 45% of revenue. Corporate Payments — business cards, virtual cards, accounts payable automation, and cross-border payments — has become the fastest-growing segment, generating $1.64 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025, up 34% and growing 17% to 19% organically. Lodging Payments — hotel booking and payment for traveling workforces — added $470 million.
Ron Clarke has been CEO since founding. The company went public in 2010 on the New York Stock Exchange. Today it operates in more than 100 countries and serves over 800,000 business clients.
In fiscal 2025, Corpay reported approximately $4.5 billion in net revenue. Net income attributable to Corpay was $1.07 billion — up 7%. Adjusted net income was $1.52 billion. Adjusted net income per diluted share was $21.38 — up 12%. The adjusted EBITDA margin was 56.6%. Organic revenue grew 10% for the full year. And Clarke deployed $4.3 billion in capital during the year — the largest acquisition year in the company’s history — expanding the Corporate Payments segment with its biggest cross-border deal to date.
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That 56.6% adjusted EBITDA margin tells you what kind of business this is. Corpay doesn’t manufacture anything. It doesn’t hold inventory. It doesn’t employ truck drivers or hotel staff. It sits between the payer and the payee and processes the transaction — taking a small percentage of each one. The transactions are high-volume, low-ticket, and automatic. A fleet of 500 trucks filling up three times a week generates 1,500 transactions per week — each one producing a fee. The fee is small enough that nobody negotiates it away. But multiplied across 800,000 clients and millions of transactions per day, it adds up to $4.5 billion.
The stickiness is operational. A fleet manager who uses Corpay’s vehicle cards has configured the system to control fuel purchases by driver, by vehicle, by location, and by time of day. The spending rules, the reporting dashboards, the accounting integrations — all of it lives inside Corpay’s platform. Switching means rebuilding every control, reissuing every card, and retraining every driver. For a corporate payments client using Corpay’s AP automation, switching means remapping every vendor, every approval workflow, and every payment method. The integration is the lock-in. The deeper the integration, the higher the switching cost.
Clarke said it plainly in the fourth-quarter results: “2025 was a very successful year for Corpay. We delivered 10% organic revenue growth along with $21.38 of earnings per share.” He added that the company deployed over $4.3 billion in capital — including the largest cross-border acquisition in its history — expanding its Corporate Payments segment, where organic revenue grew in the high teens for the second consecutive year.
The flywheel runs on the inevitability of corporate spending. Businesses don’t stop buying fuel. They don’t stop paying suppliers. They don’t stop booking hotels. The expenses arrive whether the economy is growing or contracting — and every expense that passes through Corpay’s platform generates a fee. Corporate Payments is now 36% of revenue and growing nearly twice as fast as the rest of the business. The segment processes cross-border payments, virtual card transactions, and accounts payable automation — each one a new toll on a new type of business expense. Clarke has spent 25 years adding lanes to the toll road. Every new payment type, every new geography, and every new acquisition adds another stream of fees that arrive the same way the first fleet card transaction did in 2000: automatically, invisibly, on every swipe.
WHY THIS WORKS
The fee is invisible. Corpay earns a small percentage of each transaction — paid by the merchant, embedded in the payment, never itemized on the receipt. The payer doesn’t see it. The payee absorbs it. Nobody negotiates it away.
56.6% EBITDA margin on a payment processing model. No inventory. No manufacturing. No physical product. The business processes transactions and takes a cut. Nearly $0.57 of every dollar of revenue drops to operating profit.
800,000 clients across 100+ countries. Vehicle fleets, corporate AP departments, and traveling workforces all use Corpay’s platform. The client base is diversified across industries, geographies, and spending categories.
Corporate Payments is growing 17-19% organically. Cross-border payments, virtual cards, and AP automation are replacing manual processes across global enterprises. Every new client adds a new stream of automatic fees — for years.
Ron Clarke started FleetCor in 2000 with a thesis that sounded boring: businesses spend money badly, and the process of spending it is full of friction. He built a card that controlled what a truck driver could buy at the gas pump. Then he built a platform that processed hotel payments for traveling workers. Then he built a system that automated accounts payable for corporations sending payments across borders. He rebranded the company Corpay in 2024 because the name FleetCor no longer described what it had become. The fleet card was the beginning. The corporate payment is the future. And the fee — the small, invisible, automatic fee that arrives on every transaction, in every segment, in every country — is still the same one Clarke saw 25 years ago in the space between the card and the receipt.
