The ISO 15118 standard that ensures secure communications between car and charger is merely a foundation for a whole range of exciting products and services that will simplify electric motoring for drivers.
This week, at EVS 38 in Gothenburg Hyfer and DEFA, a Norwegian payments startup and a Norwegian charging brand have launched a revolutionary new way to simply payments for charging.
Europe leads the way in interoperability, mandating ISO15118, roaming and ad-hoc payments through the EU wide alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulations (AFIR).
An example of secure ad-hoc payments is DEFA’s dynamic QR code payment system, drivers pay by scanning a dynamic QR code and then an ad-hoc payment can be completed with Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Dynamic QR codes are essential as the prevent man in the middle fraud where a malicious actor sticks a fake QR code on a charger which takes you to a fraudulent payment gateway that either steals credit card details, money or both.
Although this is convenient, Hyfer wants to remove the QR code and associated friction.
What Hyfer launched is potentially game changing – rather than Plug and Charge using a roaming hub, incurring both the costs for the roaming hub and the credit card transaction fee, Hyfer, in partnership with Mastercard can tokenise a driver’s credit card and embed it in a secure ISO15118-20 charging contract.
When this is presented to the charger, no roaming hub is needed as the credit card token is processed like a tap and go transaction.
Australia is one of the worlds biggest users of tokenised card payment with Apple Pay, Google Pay and other wallet systems having a very high level of adoption. Effectively this creates a vehicle wallet that can be used to pay for charging.
It’s easy to imagine how this could be very convenient not only for drivers but also for fleet users who could tokenise fuel cards and embed them in their employee’s vehicles.
For CPOs this has the potential to reduce or eliminate the costs of roaming and credit card readers. Tokenisation is also a key tool in eliminating many kinds of credit card fraud as the credit card number and other details are never disclosed during the transaction. For vehicle OEMs that perceive supporting plug and charge as and unnecessary cost, operating a wallet could generate additional revenue.
Because this is an open loop payment system based on the transaction systems we use every day the possibilities are endless.
Anders Granquist, CEO of Hyfer, sees potential beyond simply paying for charging, one use case he highlighted was using the tokenised credit card as a pathway to pay drivers for ad-hoc V2G sessions wherever they happen to be parked and charging.
The Driven has also seen the work of Mavi.io in the USA which is pioneering a dashboard commerce platform allowing drivers to order food or other products through the touchscreen or using a voice assistant and its easy to see a use case for in-car payment tokens as well as paying for parking, tolls and other vehicle related services.
Anders drove down from Norway to Gothenburg and has founded Hyfer to deal with his own frustrations with the charging experience in Norway, which features 20 apps using 13 different payment systems.
Being outside the EU, Norway has followed a different path to the rest of Europe and, as in Australia, roaming is something that CPOs see as costly and at odds with delivering a consistent high quality customer experience.
Hyfer is just one of many innovations to make charging simpler, more cost effective and consumer friendly being developed across mature charging ecosystems and evidence of the industry growing up as it becomes both mass market and ubiquitous.
