Oxford-based online solutions provider, Ebbon-Dacs, has made a strategic acquisition with the purchase of fleet driver licence and compliance specialist, Licence Check, for an undisclosed sum.
Derby-based Licence Check, which recently won the Safety Award at the 2018 Business Car Awards and celebrated its tenth anniversary last month, was established in 2008 by managing director Richard Brown, and is one of the UK’s leading licence checking businesses, carrying out hundreds of thousands of online driver licence checks per annum.
The company works with both private and public sector customers, including end user fleets, vehicle leasing and rental suppliers, transport and logistics companies and coach and bus operators, to name but a few, providing real-time driving licence checking solutions.
The company is also a founding member of the Association for Driving Licence Verification (ADLV), the trade body for driving licence checking operators.
More recently, the company’s range of customer services has been expanded under the Driver and Vehicle Information Solution brand, DAVIS, a cloud solution to help manage driver and vehicle fleet compliance including the grey fleet.
Richard Brown and commercial director, Terry Hiles, along with all existing staff, will remain with the business, which will continue to be based in Derby.
Ebbon Dacs director Robert Pilkington said the acquisition made perfect business sense for both companies.
“Our strategy is to remain solely focussed on providing online solutions that help connect the vehicle leasing community. Our principle investments will be in new capabilities for our fleet vehicle purchasing and mobile logistics platforms, while continuing to build up our more recent fleet compliance systems area.
“DAVIS, coupled with our own latest mobile technologies is the means by which we plan to offer our customers the best platform in this important health and safety area for both end-user fleets and our many customers who provide to these fleets,” he said.
Fellow director Craig Gibbin continued: “Licence checking, risk assessment and compliance will assume an ever increasing significance, not just for company-owned but privately-owned vehicles, to ensure that duty of care requirements are being met in terms of both driving licence and vehicle condition checking.”
Richard Brown welcomed the new relationship and said there were “significant and exciting opportunities going forward and Ebbon-Dacs will allow us to accelerate our compliance services further”.
“Ebbon-Dacs wanted to move into the driver compliance business space and saw our DAVIS solution as the most advanced technological solution on the market by a mile.
“We are also very impressed with Ebbon-Dacs’ technology platforms which are complementary to our own, as well as their existing mobile applications which we see as a great opportunity for future development both here in the UK and in Europe,” he added.