Volkswagen Pon Financial Services NL has begun the first phase of switching the fleet contracts side of its business, some 75,000 vehicles in total, on to the Miles platform from global software provider, Sofico, following the successful completion of its retail finance project.

Volkswagen Pon Financial Services NL (VWPFS) is a joint venture between Volkswagen Financial Services and Pon Holdings BV in the Netherlands, and currently manages around 48,000 active retail finance contracts, for both private customers and SMEs, and around 75,000 fleet car contracts, including 5,000 trucks and buses.

The business has now completed the successful migration of all its retail contracts to Miles, the hybrid contract management system for fleet and retail users from Sofico, in a project that first went live in November 2015.

The roll-out of Miles was planned in a series of steps, beginning with VWPFS’s third party, white label proposition, Autocash, and then moving on to its captive finance companies.

As a result of the successful completion of that project, three systems have been replaced by one, with one customer view, and Miles now manages the front, mid and back offices for VWPFS.

Marc Overgoor, director of operations at VWPFS, said: “Amongst a number of benefits, Miles has given us the freedom and flexibility to offer a wider range of amalgamated financial products for our customers.

“With the parallel implementation in the third quarter of last year of our new competence centre retail and fleet, which brings business, process and IT knowledge together in one place, we can manage changes in configuration, workflows and products from the business by ourselves.

“We now plan to use this expertise we have gained through the retail project and extend that to implementing Miles on the fleet contracts side of our business."

The fleet project is expected to be completed by the autumn of 2018, by which time all 75,000 VWPFS fleet contracts will have been migrated over to Miles.

Ghent-based Sofico, which provides software and consultancy to the automotive finance, leasing, fleet and mobility industry, first launched Miles more than 11 years ago and the platform now manages more than 1.5 million vehicles in 20 countries around the world.