Why is private aviation so convoluted?

[YVRKid]

To put it colloquially, why do so many people have their fingers in the pie?

I'll give an example to demonstrate what I mean:

I work for a well-known flight support company (may or may not be based in the Middle East) and we do all sorts of services for non-scheduled aviation. The other day, we had a fuel request. The operator (company A) asked another company (company B) to set up fuel for their flights to 3 different destinations in the span of 2 days. Company B came to us (Company C), because we're 'experts' in that region, requesting the fuel. We, in turn, asked our vendor (Company D) in the area, to set up fuel. They went to their various companies at each airport (Companies E, F, G) to set up the fuel, and the planes were fueled by entirely different companies (Companies H, I, J).

Is that not ridiculous? I mean, I'm new to the game, but Company A>B>C>D>E, F, G>H, I, J just to set up fuel? And we're not talking huge uplifts, maybe 6, 7 tonnes max. How can so many people have their fingers in the pie?

That's just one example, but I see it (to a lesser extent usually) across the board.

Can someone explain this to me? Is this a problem in the business or do people see this as normal and I'm the weird one?

[Cambridge172]

Of course the simplest thing around the world would be for crews to just whip out their Amex, Visa or Mastercard and wack every fuel uplift onto those. Unfortunately most crews are not given such credit cards (normal business account credit cards) or the ones they have don't have anywhere near enough credit on them and nor do the operators have credit accounts at each and every airport or FBO or with every fuel reseller they go to around the planet. As such, with no 'credit' available, they have to work with flight planning outfits or other specialist companies, fuel card/credit/carnet providers with whom they do have credit accounts, to pay for the fuel uplifted on their behalf, often by pre-arrangement and each person in the chain takes their percentage. Certain crews, for let's say a number of subcontinental operators, carry around huge amounts of US dollars to literally pay cash, because nobody will extend a line of credit to that particular outfit.

The whole system is extraordinarily messy, massively competitive and open to all sorts of exchange rate conversion fiddles where all fuel ultimately originates in US dollars per US gallon.