pipeline fuel card

Questions and answers from the MSE forum -

"Pipeline facts and fiction

Thank you to all of you who have signed up. Our membership is growing and we are really grateful to Martin for his support.

I thought it might be helpful to try and respond to some of the sceptics and clear up some confusions about what Pipeline is, and what it isn't.

Firstly it's a membership organisation whose purpose is to secure discounts for its members.

We do need a certain minimum amount of information in order to be able to contact our members. An email address will do for now - even a 'disposable' Hotmail or Yahoo address if you are worried - but bear in mind that if you want us to actually send you a card we will need a postal address as well at some stage. We would rather that you included it now.

To be honest, we had hoped that our privacy policy was implicit. Pipeline was set up to secure a better deal for British motorists, not to capture personal information. If spam is your business, you can buy 3 million UK email addresses on Ebay for about £30! It's illegal to spam people in this country which may be why almost all of the spam I get comes from abroad.

Having said that, lots of people have wriiten to me expressing genuine concern, so we are drafting a Privacy Policy and it will be included on the site in the next day or two.

For now, let me make it very clear: we will not pbutt on your details to marketeers. We will not spam you and we will not allow others to spam you.

People have also raised concerns about how this will work. It's true that the retail margins on fuel are not enormous but, despite this, there are several discount fuel cards - for companies - already out there. Pipeline is different in that it is for individuals. It's not a credit card, it's a discount card. Profits are made by fuel companies in several ways and at several stages in the manufacturing and supply process.

Pipeline is a partnership and, for now, our retail partner doesn't want to be named. I have no control over that. I can tell you that it's a well-known brand and we will go public with more details as soon as we can.

Meanwhile, thanks again to all those who have pledged their support. We need a lot of members to make this work on a national scale and, thanks to you, we are getting them.

Ben Scammell"