Alphabet, the all-makes leasing and contract hire division of BMW Finance, has ambitious plans to grow its business across Europe over the next five years.

The company has set itself a target of moving into the top five pan-European fleet funders by 2015 and also the top five in the UK. Currently, Alphabet is ranked ninth largest in the UK with around 47,000 vehicles under contract.

Jon Burdekin, head of account management at Alphabet GB, said most of the growth would come from winning more multi-make business. It would take the company’s funded fleet to around 60,000 cars.

“We’re looking at achieving this by organic growth; we don’t have any grand plans for takeovers,” he said. “We aim to grow the multi-make side more than the BMW business. Yes, we will fund many of the BMWs out there, but we don’t intend to fund every BMW in the business.

“The first car on a fleet may be a BMW but we have to embrace the fact that our customers have more than BMWs. We have to be there to fund the other makes if we are going to get into that top five.”

Burdekin said the strategy was to sign up “big fleet” customers with a 1000 cars or more at a rate of two or three a year, and Alphabet has recently recruited Nigel Trotman, formerly at Lex Autolease and, prior to that, head of fleet at Whitbread, as a consultant to help put the necessary infrastructure in place.

The company has already added around 3000 cars to its fleet this year and Burdekin said part of that growth was down to having access to pan-European BMW funding.

“We have seen some fleet funders declining and others amalgamating, but we have been steadily winning more business,” he explained. “I think part of that may be down to the cost of (borrowing) money.

“But we don’t want to go overboard on new business. We need to ensure people get the service levels they expect and we can’t do that if it all comes at once.”

Burdekin added that under half of cars funded currently by Alphabet were BMW Group product and that, if you removed the BMW Corporate Finance element, which is channelled through BMW and Mini dealers, that fell to just over 20%.