EXCLUSIVE: “Power Lines” – Andre Moeller, Elli in ‘The Paytech Magazine’

VW-owned Elli is joining the dots between charging stations for electric vehicles and payments

The car’s packed, the dog’s in boarding kennels, the kids are excited. First leg Dover, ferry to Calais, down the French autoroute and through the Mont-Blanc tunnel for the summer holiday at Lake Garda. It’s the kind of driving trip that families have enjoyed – or endured – for decades.

But how easy is it to navigate such a trans-continental journey in an electric car?

It’s a question that Andre Moeller from Volkswagen Group-owned electric mobility company Elli, asks himself when he envisions how cross-border travel should look in a vehicle that’s not powered by internal combustion. For many private car owners, their electric car is fed by a wall charger at home most of the time. But, when big trips are needed, these drivers join the ranks of company car users who need a network that’s dependable and efficient.

“We work on all these situations and find the best solutions for the customer – we’re starting with the customer view,” says Moeller, who is Head of Payments, Risk and Fraud Management at Elli. “We may not encounter a customer for six months because they own a house and charge the car at home. Then summer comes and they’re driving through Europe and everything needs to work.”

Elli is Europe’s biggest charging network operator with more than 750,000 charging points across 28 countries. That scale has been built on a partner network with providers including IONITY, bp’s Aral Pulse and Audi Charging Hubs in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Ewiva in Italy and Zunder ES*ZUN in southern Europe.

Customers register a payment method through the Elli app – Visa, Mastercard and PayPal are the three options – then they can interact with a charger using the app, a physical card paired to the app, or by using the car itself. Elli launched its own pay-by-car feature, called Plug&Charge, last year. Moeller says it’s the embodiment of embedded payments.

“We may not encounter a customer for six months because they charge the car at home. Then summer comes and they’re driving through Europe and everything needs to work”

“You drive up to the charging point, plug in the cable, and that’s it. The charging point identifies the car. That brings us to the next level,” he says. “The customer doesn’t need to use a card or a smartphone.”

Customers aren’t completely sold on the idea of pay-by-car yet, he admits – at least, not yet. They’re happy using their app or Elli card to activate the charging process. But the Plug&Charge system, which is only currently supported by IONITY chargers in the UK, clearly reduces payment friction and starts to make use of the huge technological capabilities of the modern electric vehicle, says Moeller.

He’s no fan of innovation for innovation’s sake but he believes the feature will be seized by upon by retailers as a way to upsell products that will be of benefit to drivers as they wait for their cars to charge. Drinks and food, for example, could be offered via the car’s infotainment screen as the vehicle approaches a charging stop, their order made ready for when the driver steps through the door, and then the cost is automatically added to the charging bill.

Moeller says: “We have a sister company, Electrify America in the US, and as well as building a charging network, they’re building halls where you can go to wait as the car charges. It’s a co-working space where you can have a coffee and there’s a playground for the kids, too. This is prime time [for a retailer] because the quickest charge a driver is going to make is 10 minutes.”

Elli Charge&Fuel is another embedded product that manages payment processing of fleet-related services, including company vehicle charging, traditional fuelling, and car washing across Europe. It also covers public transport and electric bicycle/scooter hire in cities. Elli has now begun to white-label these embedded products, starting last year with car rental giant SIXT, which runs an app using the German firm’s rails.

“We set up a partnership with SIXT because they have opportunities such as recurring car payments from vehicle subscriptions, the classic car hire business and scooters,” says Moeller. “They were looking for a charging partner so we built a product related to their customers, who can now charge their cars over the SIXT app, which they couldn’t before. That for me is the future we need – more collaborations. We use the customer data together and bring something positive for the customer.”

This article was published in The Paytech Magazine Issue 16, Page 33