Behind the plug: Who's who in the EV charging ecosystem
When you plug in your car, a quiet digital conversation begins. In this Part 1, we'll cover who’s talking, and why seamless charging is harder than it looks.
A warm welcome
Welcome, and thank you for being here.
If you’ve just joined from the old Switch EV newsletter – welcome back! This marks the first issue of my new publication, Current Affairs.
This is my very first Substack article. A new beginning, and a new space for me to continue my mission as a technical guide through the complex world of EV charging.
If you’re a charge point operator, EV or charger manufacturer, mobility service provider, utility, consultant, researcher, or simply someone who wants to really understand how the EV ecosystem fits together – this space is for you.
For over a decade, I’ve been building this ecosystem from the inside and teaching companies the ins and outs of complex EV charging standards. And now I’m here to continue sharing that experience with everyone else who needs to truly understand how it all fits together.
My goal is to make this publication your go-to source for:
Clear explanations of complex standards like ISO 15118 and OCPP
Behind-the-scenes perspectives from industry professionals
Reflections on innovation, policies, and the future of EVs as mobile batteries
Operational insights from a Charge Point Operator’s view
Practical explorations of how AI and automation can make EV charging networks more reliable and smarter
This is a shared journey, not a monologue. Your feedback will directly shape what I write about next. What questions are you trying to answer? What’s most interesting to you? Just hit reply and let me know.
I’ll be here (bi-)weekly with new posts, and with your input, this will become an essential resource for anyone navigating the charging space.
All right, let’s dive into the world of EV charging – starting with the main market roles.
Charging an electric vehicle (EV) shouldn’t be harder than filling up a car with fuel. In fact, it should even be easier. Plug in, wait a few minutes (while you maybe eat a snack or use the bathroom), unplug, drive away - done! No need to even go inside to pay for the charged energy because it’s all paid for automatically. That’s the Tesla experience, and guess what – the same experience is achievable for ALL EV drivers.
Yet in practice, EV charging often feels anything but straightforward. And that’s puzzling, because EVs themselves are far less complex than the combustion cars they’re replacing.
But behind the scenes of a charging session unfolds a whole orchestra of market roles and communication protocols that must act in concert to make charging seamless. Although the first early-adopter phase of modern EVs began around 2010-2012, the EV charging ecosystem is still in the process of standardising and aligning its many moving parts. Comparisons with the telecommunications industry are common: both depend on interoperable networks, shared standards, and reliable data exchange. The difference is that EV charging can build on the lessons telecom learned over decades of standardisation and integration, allowing our industry to reach maturity much faster.
In today’s article (Part 1), we start off by explaining the main market roles:
Charge Point Operator (CPO)
Mobility Service Provider (MSP)
Roaming Platform / Hub
Payment Service Provider (PSP)
Payment Terminal Provider
Distribution System Operator (DSO)
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) Operator
EV and Charger Manufacturer (OEMs)
Part 2 will then dive into the actual communication protocols used to exchange data between these market roles in order to facilitate interoperability, scalability, and – ultimately – a seamless charging experience for EV drivers.
So let’s dive right in.
Market roles in EV charging
When you plug in your car, you’re not just connecting to a charger. You’re entering a complete ecosystem.
Behind that simple action sits a web of companies, contracts, and communication layers, all working together (or at least trying to).
The image below shows the key players and how they interact through various communication protocols. Let’s unpack who does what and why it matters.
Charge Point Operator
Whether it’s the charger on your street, the one at your office, or a rapid charger on the motorway, someone needs to make sure it’s alive, available, and behaving.
That’s the job of the Charge Point Operator (CPO) – the company responsible for keeping chargers running smoothly, monitoring their health, and ensuring drivers can actually charge when they arrive.
To do this, CPOs use a Charge Point Management System (CPMS) – also called a Charging Station Management System (CSMS) – typically a cloud-based platform that talks to each charger in real time. These CPMS platforms are either built in-house or provided by specialised Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies like Ampeco, Monta, Driivz, Greenflux, Spirii, or Chargepoint, to name just a few.
Communication happens via a WebSocket connection using the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP – more on that in Part 2 of this article), most often over Ethernet or a cellular network through a SIM card inside the charger.
In short, if a charger is the hardware, the CPMS is the central nervous system connected to a wider set of market roles, and the CPO is the one making sure it doesn’t have a breakdown.
Mobility Service Provider
There’s more than one way to start a charging session. You might download an app from the CPO directly, register your name, address, and payment details, and start charging through that app. Or you might simply tap your credit card at a contactless payment terminal – no registration, no contract, completely anonymous.
But behind many public charging experiences sits another, often invisible layer: the Mobility Service Provider (MSP).
The MSP gives you an electricity contract for your car, linked to a digital identity: your authentication token. That token might be:
an RFID card you tap at the charger,
your user account within an MSP’s mobile app, or
a digital certificate embedded directly in your vehicle (for the Plug & Charge experience defined in ISO 151181).
In the ISO 15118 standard, this role is called the Mobility Operator (MO) – but the idea is the same: the MSP connects your identity, contract, and payment method to the charging infrastructure and authenticates your session (enabling the CPO to grant access to its charging infrastructure after the MSP confirmed that the EV driver is a valid customer) and ensures billing happens correctly, even when you’re roaming across networks run by different CPOs.
Roaming Platform
Imagine driving across Europe and being able to charge your EV anywhere, without juggling half a dozen apps or RFID cards from various CPO networks. That’s the idea behind EV roaming: enabling drivers to charge at stations operated by different CPOs using a single credential.
To make that happen, CPOs and MSPs need to exchange a lot of information automatically. Things like driver authentication, session authorisation, billing data, and real-time station details such as location, pricing, and availability.
A roaming platform (or roaming hub) acts as a digital marketplace, a broker of sorts, where CPOs and MSPs can connect and form roaming agreements based on pre-defined legal contract templates. These agreements let an MSP’s customers access a much wider network of chargers, and let CPOs make their infrastructure available to many more drivers, which results in increased utilisation and revenues.
Instead of managing dozens of one-to-one contracts, both sides can join a roaming hub that offers what’s known as “offer-to-all” functionality. This allows every CPO on the platform to publish its tariffs to all participating MSPs, and vice versa. They can still make bilateral deals on top of that if they want special commercial terms, but the hub takes care of the messy part: contractual agreements & interoperability at scale.
Some of the most established European roaming platforms today are Hubject and Gireve. Hubject remains the dominant global player, connecting over a million charging points through thousands of partner networks across 70+ countries, and serving as a de facto backbone for cross-border interoperability. Meanwhile, Gireve is especially active across France and greater Western Europe. Its roaming barometer showed around 659,000 connected stations as of October 2025. Thirdly, there is also e-clearing.net, another early player in the market, with a strong German foundation and active across Europe. More recently, newer entrants such as ENAPI are gaining momentum in Europe: for instance, Driivz (a prominent SaaS provider for CPOs) has partnered with ENAPI to leverage its network of 350,000+ connected points.
In the United States, Hubject is extending its footprint through integrations (e.g., with Blink), and ChargeHub is a key local roaming hub via its Passport Hub. Meanwhile, in markets like the US and UK, peer-to-peer (bilateral) roaming – direct agreements between CPOs and MSPs without a hub – continues to be widespread.
Which Roaming Partners & Hubs Should a CPO Focus On?
That, my friend, is a question that needs to be answered on a case by case basis. It depends on the region you operate in, your individual network, your in-house legal expertise (and appetite to negotiate terms), and your need for flexibility when it comes to implementing specific roaming functionalities. However, at least for Europe and the UK, I can point out a few big players in the market that give you instant access to a big network of EV drivers:
Roaming hub: The biggest and most well-established player across the globe is Hubject. Their intercharge CPO solution costs you a one-off technical integration fee of €5,000 and then €99 per month. No caps on the number of charge points you integrate, no other hidden fees, and instant access to hundreds of MSPs.
Peer-to-peer roaming: Some of the bigger MSPs on the market include Octopus Electroverse, Plugsurfing, Shell Recharge, Maingau Energie, DCS (Digital Charging Solutions) and Elli (Volkswagen’s e-mobility service).
Particularly DCS and Elli are interesting MSP solutions, as they offer white-labelled MSP apps for major automotive brands and fleet operators. This means the charging stations they provide access to are automatically integrated into the vehicle’s onboard navigation system. The moment a driver searches for a charger, your charging site could appear right on their dashboard.
For CPOs, this kind of integration is gold: it boosts charger visibility, drives more sessions without additional marketing spend, and ensures that their network is part of the seamless charging experience drivers now expect.
Payment Service Provider
A Payment Service Provider (PSP) facilitates financial transactions between EV drivers and CPOs by securely processing card or digital payments. PSPs like Adyen or Stripe handle the authorisation (this includes pre-authorising an amount on your credit or debit card up to which you’re allowed to charge energy), capturing the pre-auth amount and settlement, and compliance aspects of payments. This ensures that funds flow correctly between customers, charge point operators, and intermediaries.
They enable multiple payment methods (contactless, app-based, or web payments) and ensure adherence to standards such as PCI DSS and PSD2, often integrating directly with CPO or MSP platforms via proprietary APIs to streamline the payment experience.
Payment Terminal Provider
Those are the manufacturers of card/contactless terminals embedded in or paired with charging stations via a standalone kiosk solution. Some of the more well-known players in this market are Payter, Nayax, CCV, Worldline, and Castles. They supply the hardware, device management, and payment processing interfaces used for ad-hoc EMV payments. Those are card payments that follow the global standard developed by Europay, Mastercard, and Visa – hence the name EMV. Integration typically follows two patterns:
OEM-managed: the charger manufacturer integrates the terminal locally via the vendor’s SDK/protocol and calls the vendor’s cloud (common with Payter’s local “PSP” or cloud “CPS/MyPayter” flows)
CPO-managed (cloud): the CPO integrates directly with the terminal provider’s cloud, sometimes via a proprietary API, and – increasingly – via OCPI-based payment/kiosk integrations where offered (e.g. CCV “Cloud-Connect” and Nayax OCPI). Choice of model affects who controls the user flow on the terminal screen, receipting, pre-auth/settlement logic, and telemetry.
In short, Payment Terminal Providers bridge the charger to the card schemes, while CPOs decide whether that bridge is handled by the charger OEM or by the CPO backend for greater control.
Distribution System Operator
The Distribution System Operator (DSO) is the quiet force keeping electricity flowing where it’s needed: from power plants, solar farms, and wind parks all the way to homes, offices, and charging stations. DSOs manage the low- and medium-voltage grids that connect end consumers to the larger transmission network.
In practice, this means they balance supply and demand on local grids, maintain network stability, and ensure that the energy your EV draws is delivered safely and reliably, whether you’re charging at home, at work, or at a public station on the corner.
Public Key Infrastructure Operator
When it comes to secure EV charging, trust is everything. And that trust is built on cryptography.
At the heart of it all sits the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the system that manages the digital identities used by electric vehicles, charging stations, and back-end systems to authenticate one another.
This infrastructure enables what’s known as Plug & Charge, a technology defined in ISO 15118 that allows an EV to automatically identify itself and start charging securely, without the driver needing an app, RFID card, or credit card.
In the diagram above, I refer to the entity operating this ecosystem as the PKI Operator. The role is complex and consists of multiple sub-roles (like certificate authorities, registration authorities, and data pool providers for various types of digital certificates), often run by different organisations. For simplicity, I’ve grouped them together here under one umbrella.
The PKI Operator ensures that when an EV connects to a charger, both sides can verify each other’s identity, encrypt their communication, and prevent fraud or cyberattacks across what is increasingly recognised as critical national infrastructure.
This is a vast and fascinating topic, and one I’ve spent years exploring. I even wrote an entire book about it, The ISO 15118 Manual, which I’ll be breaking down into a series of posts over the coming weeks and months. We’ll look at how cryptography keeps EV charging secure, how Plug & Charge really works, and what it takes to build digital trust at scale.
EV and Charging Station Manufacturer
This one’s fairly self-explanatory – someone has to build the cars and the chargers. 😉
But it’s worth remembering that vehicle manufacturers (often referred to as the OEMs) and charging station manufacturers play a crucial role in ensuring interoperability. Each must implement communication protocols like ISO 15118 and OCPP correctly so that EVs and chargers can speak the same digital language. When they do, charging feels seamless; when they don’t, we all notice.
That’s it. These are the main roles working behind the scenes to make a seamless charging experience possible. To be fair, this isn’t an exhaustive list of every player involved in the charging and payment process. I could go on about financial roles like the acquiring bank, issuing bank, and merchant of record; or grid-related roles like the energy supplier, flexibility service provider, transmission system operator (TSO), or energy management system (EMS) within a building. Not to mention site hosts, installation and maintenance service partners, and navigation or mapping services.
At some point, though, the ecosystem diagram turns into spaghetti – and this first part is meant to give you a clear overview of the core actors before we dive into the communication protocols that connect them in Part 2.
Abbreviations
As you probably start to realise, this industry comes with its own set of abbreviations, and it’s easy to get lost if you’re new to this world. To save you from acronym overload, I’ve created a handy cheat sheet for the key terms used throughout all my articles: welcome to my Acronym Survival Guide. Keep it handy, you’ll need it.
As a co-author and early implementer of ISO 15118, I’ve gathered and shared a lot of insights about this communication standard over the past 15 years. I’ll make sure to cover this profound technology in a series of upcoming articles. Let me know what you’d particularly be interested in, so you get the most out of it for yourself.
How does the existing system without plug and charge. Can you explain who talks to whom in that case? How does it work without certificates?