FleetCor Technologies, now operating as Corpay, will pay $100 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission case alleging it charged small business fuel card customers hidden and unauthorized fees while promising savings that never materialized. The FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said FleetCor also imposed late fees on customers who paid on time or who the company itself blocked from paying, then misrepresented its fraud control features. “FleetCor deceived its small business customers by promising fuel savings that never materialized, while unfairly charging them hidden and unauthorized fees,” said Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The order follows a federal appeals court ruling this year that upheld a 2023 summary judgment against the company on all counts.
The settlement matters because it closes a seven year enforcement case with the largest number attached yet: FTC officials say the underlying unauthorized fees ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars across tens of thousands of business customers. It also sets a fresh price on future noncompliance. The consent order caps future violations at civil penalties of up to $53,088 each, a figure that turns what was once a cost of doing business fee model into an explicit legal ceiling corporate card issuers now have to price against.
The original insight here is procedural, not just financial: the FTC waited for the appeals court to affirm the injunction before settling, rather than negotiating a number while liability was still contested. That sequencing, similar to how smaller card industry fines have landed as rounding errors, suggests regulators are increasingly willing to litigate corporate card and B2B payment fee practices to a final judgment before naming a settlement figure, which raises the stakes for any fintech that treats bank-fintech partnership fee structures as a negotiable cost center rather than a compliance obligation.
Source: Federal Trade Commission
