According to the Worldpay Global Payments Report, digital payments accounted for 66% of all transactions in 2024, and by 2030 that share could exceed 70%. Today, consumers can buy almost anything online—from a cup of coffee to a train ticket. The same trend is steadily reshaping the fuel market, where drivers are increasingly paying for gas through mobile services.
One of the projects that helped drive this digital transformation was FuelUp, an online fuel-payment platform created by fintech and digital-services entrepreneur Iskhak Kazanbiev. The platform was designed to simplify refueling for both individual drivers and companies operating vehicle fleets. Its key feature was straightforward: users could pay for fuel and complete the refueling process directly through a mobile app, without ever going to the cashier.
In 2021, Kazanbiev completed an M&A transaction that brought the service into the ecosystem of a bank that ranked among the world’s largest acquiring institutions.
Spotting the Trend Early
By the time FuelUp launched, mobile fuel payment was already being tested by some international gas-station chains. But those solutions were typically limited to a single network and were not built for corporate clients. Companies managing fleets still had to work with multiple operators and rely on different payment tools.
“There were mobile apps from individual gas-station chains, but they were mostly informational and centered on loyalty programs. A universal online-payment solution—and especially one designed for companies with fleets—didn’t really exist,” says Iskhak Kazanbiev, founder and head of FuelUp. “I wanted to create a system-level solution and bring structure to this segment.”
FuelUp’s business model resembled Uber’s in one important sense: it was built as an independent payments infrastructure capable of enabling fuel purchases across multiple gas-station networks through one mobile app, bringing them together on a single digital platform.
There were few direct analogues. One example was the German project Ryd, which also allowed consumers to pay for fuel across different stations through a unified interface. Unlike FuelUp, however, it served only retail consumers.
A New Payment Method for Corporate Clients
Over time, the product evolved from a mobile app into a full-fledged fintech platform with multi-network coverage. On top of it, the company launched FuelUp for Business, a SaaS solution based on virtual fuel cards that allowed businesses to manage corporate fuel spending more efficiently through a single digital tool.
The expansion into the corporate segment was a strategic move, because the retail side alone was not sufficient to cover operating costs. Under Kazanbiev’s leadership, the team built its own processing infrastructure, completed integrations with more than 30 software solutions and banks, and began connecting gas stations directly to the platform.
Its primary customers became logistics companies, taxi aggregators, courier services and field-service businesses—for all of whom fuel is one of the largest expense categories. The platform gave them the ability to set driver limits, monitor transactions in real time and analyze fleet expenses centrally. By moving to a digital model, companies were also able to abandon plastic fuel cards and reduce the amount of manual accounting work.
The Results: Key Changes
At Kazanbiev’s initiative, FuelUp for Business began working systematically with the enterprise segment—companies with large fleets and substantial daily transaction volumes. The service was integrated into their internal workflows, and more than 100,000 drivers gained the ability to pay for fuel online using virtual fuel cards. That gave large businesses a new tool for controlling and optimizing fuel costs.
Under Kazanbiev’s leadership, the platform connected more than 6,000 gas stations, making online fuel payments available across virtually all regions of the country.
In 2021, Kazanbiev closed the M&A deal that brought the service into a major financial ecosystem. Seamless integration with platforms whose combined audience exceeded 100 million users enabled the company to attract hundreds of thousands of retail customers and tens of thousands of corporate clients, significantly increase transaction volume and accelerate scale through ecosystem distribution and partner networks.
As the company grew, so did Kazanbiev’s own expertise. He launched the product from scratch, organized the technical integration of gas-station networks, designed the payment model and led negotiations with banks and partners. A separate focus of his work was building the SaaS solution for fuel-expense management for companies operating commercial vehicles—introducing virtual cards, setting spending limits, enabling online transaction control and integrating the solution into clients’ financial workflows. Later, he helped prepare the company for the M&A transaction and oversaw the seamless integration of the service into the digital products of the broader financial ecosystem.
That experience became the foundation for his next venture. Today, his focus is on launching an international fintech service for corporate clients.
A New Chapter
Kazanbiev is now focused on launching a corporate fintech platform in the United States, one of the world’s largest financial markets.
The U.S. market for corporate cards and expense management is measured in trillions of dollars in annual payment volume and continues to grow. According to Visa, the segment is expanding by approximately 7% per year.
At the same time, companies still report that different categories of expenses are paid for in different ways. Those transactions are often tracked across separate systems, reducing visibility into overall spending. Kazanbiev sees that fragmentation as both a market problem and an opportunity.
This next stage centers on building a SaaS solution for corporate clients that follows the same core logic as his previous project, but with much broader functionality. If FuelUp helped companies control fleet fuel expenses, the new platform is designed to address a larger challenge: managing employee spending and supplier payments in one place.
The service will include:
- a business checking account,
- corporate cards, both virtual and physical,
- flexible spending limits and policies,
- team management tools,
- and built-in analytics.
The platform is designed to make financial operations more transparent. All payments will be recorded within one system, the documents required for accounting will be collected during everyday use, and reporting will be generated automatically. That, in turn, should allow companies to close reporting periods faster, significantly reduce manual work and lower operating costs.
