Operators lose money at both ends of the same night: turning away rides they can't cover, and paying drivers to sit idle an hour away. The work and the capacity exist at the same moment — there just isn't a market between them.
Every attempt to fix that so far has come from outside the industry: consumer apps, brokers taking a cut off the top, marketplaces that treat a licensed operator as interchangeable supply. Verteo is deliberately the opposite — operator-only, price ceilings set by the person who owns the client, and the award decision left in human hands.