Why EV Charging Settlement Is Broken

The conclusion first: EV charging settlement is broken not because the technology is immature, but because the financial layer was bolted on as an afterthought to an infrastructure build that prioritised physical deployment over commercial architecture. The result is an industry where chargers work, sessions complete, and money nonetheless arrives late, incorrectly attributed, or not at all. This is not a novel problem. Every major transaction industry has passed through a version of it. What varies is how long it takes to build the clearing infrastructure that resolves it. For EV charging, that moment is now.

How We Got Here: Infrastructure Before Finance

The first generation of public EV charging networks was built under a simple premise: get chargers in the ground. The commercial logic of who would pay whom, on what terms, settled within what timeframe, was largely deferred. Operators were focused on deployment targets, not settlement architecture. Regulators were focused on infrastructure coverage, not payment flows. Investors were focused on utilisation potential, not working capital velocity.

This was, in its way, rational. A settlement layer without transactions to settle is academic. You build the infrastructure first. The financial complexity can be addressed once there is volume.

The problem is that the financial complexity was never properly addressed. Instead, the industry accumulated a set of provisional arrangements — bilateral roaming agreements between individual CPOs and eMSPs, manual reconciliation processes, proprietary payment stacks that did not communicate with one another, and settlement timelines measured in weeks rather than days. Each of these arrangements made sense in isolation and at small scale. At the scale the industry now operates, they constitute a structural problem that sits at the heart of why EV charging settlement is broken.

The Roaming Patch and Why It Was Not Enough

As the number of networks grew and the need for interoperability became commercially urgent, the industry developed roaming — the mechanism by which a driver registered with one platform can initiate a session on infrastructure owned by a completely different operator. The technical protocol that underpins most roaming today is OCPI, the Open Charge Point Interface, which provides a common language for CPOs and demand-side platforms to exchange session data, tariff information, and authorisation.

OCPI was a genuine advance. It created the foundation for a market that was fragmenting into proprietary silos to begin speaking a shared language. By 2025, Hubject — which had long operated its own competing OICP protocol — formally adopted OCPI, a signal that the industry had converged on a single technical standard.

But OCPI is a data protocol, not a financial one. It defines how session information moves between parties. It does not define how money moves, on what timeline, at what cost, or through which entity. The settlement question — who gets paid, how much, and when — was left to be resolved by each pair of counterparties through their commercial agreements. In a market with hundreds of CPOs and hundreds of demand platforms, the combinatorial overhead of that approach is not a nuisance. It is a structural failure.

A CPO with fifteen roaming partners is maintaining fifteen separate reconciliation relationships. A Demand Partner with access to four hundred CPO networks is doing the same in reverse. The administrative burden scales faster than the revenue it is meant to service, and the payout cycles that result — often measured in weeks — mean that CPOs are effectively extending working capital credit to their commercial partners with no explicit arrangement to do so.

What Other Industries Teach Us About This Moment

EV charging is not the first industry to build its transaction layer before its settlement layer. The history of payments more broadly is largely a history of this exact sequence — infrastructure first, financial architecture second, and a long and sometimes painful gap in between.

Card payments are the most instructive parallel. When BankAmericard launched in 1958 — the product that would eventually become Visa — the notion of a standardised clearing layer between the issuing bank, the acquiring bank, and the merchant was still nascent. Banks operated proprietary systems. Reconciliation was manual. Settlement was slow. The Interbank Card Association, which became Mastercard, was formed in 1966 specifically to address this fragmentation: a consortium of banks recognising that they could not each build their own clearing infrastructure and that a shared neutral layer served everyone's interests better than a market of competing proprietary pipes.

What Visa and Mastercard ultimately built — the authorisation, clearing, and settlement architecture that processes tens of billions of transactions annually — was not conceived alongside the credit card. It was constructed over decades, in direct response to the chaos that a transaction infrastructure without a proper financial layer creates.

The mobile telecommunications industry passed through the same sequence. In the early years of mobile networks, a customer of one operator could not reliably make or receive calls on another operator's infrastructure across a border. Roaming existed in principle before it existed in practice, because the clearing and settlement arrangements between operators had not been built. What eventually resolved this was not better technology — the technology was already there — but the establishment of bilateral and then multilateral settlement frameworks between carriers, eventually standardised to the point where international roaming became functionally invisible to the end user.

In both cases, the pattern is identical. The technical layer arrives first and solves the connectivity problem. The financial layer arrives later and solves the commercial problem. The gap between the two is the period in which the industry is technically functional but commercially fragile.

EV charging is in that gap right now.

What Specifically Is Broken

To be precise about why EV charging settlement is broken, it is worth distinguishing between the problems that are visible and those that are not.

The visible problems are the ones drivers experience — apps that do not work at a given charger, payment methods that are not accepted, prices that differ between what was displayed and what was charged. These are real and damaging to adoption. But they are largely symptoms of the financial layer problem, not the cause.

The less visible problems are the ones that CPOs and Demand Partners live with every day. Settlement cycles that stretch to ten, fifteen, twenty days, tying up cash that should be working. Reconciliation processes that are manual, error-prone, and require dedicated operational resource to manage. Pricing that is transmitted through roaming channels but not guaranteed to arrive at the driver without modification, creating both trust risk and compliance exposure in markets where tariff transparency is now regulated. Revenue attribution that is ambiguous in multi-party transactions — where a session sourced by one platform is completed on another network via a hub, and the question of who is owed what is resolved by contract rather than by automated financial logic.

None of these problems are the result of bad intent. They are the result of an industry that built its transaction infrastructure before it built the financial architecture that should sit beneath it.

Pricing Sovereignty and the Trust Problem

One dimension of the settlement problem that deserves specific attention is pricing. In a properly functioning transaction network, the price agreed between the CPO and the end user is the price that settles. What the driver sees at the charger is what the driver pays.

In the current EV charging settlement architecture, this is not always guaranteed. In roaming scenarios, where the session is initiated through a Demand Partner's platform and the session data passes through one or more intermediaries before reaching the CPO's back-end, the tariff can be modified at any point in the chain. Roaming markups — the addition of fees by intermediaries on top of the CPO's published price — are common. They are, in many cases, the primary revenue mechanism for platforms sitting between CPOs and drivers.

This is commercially rational for the intermediary. It is structurally damaging for the CPO, whose pricing sovereignty is compromised, and for the driver, who is paying more than the published tariff without necessarily understanding why. It is also increasingly a regulatory problem. Legislation such as the EU's Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation requires price transparency at the point of charge. An EV charging settlement architecture that permits markup without disclosure is not compatible with that regulatory direction.

The consequence is that broken settlement is not only an operational problem for CPOs and Demand Partners. It is a trust problem for the drivers on whom the entire market depends.

What Fixing It Requires

The solution to broken EV charging settlement is not a better roaming protocol. OCPI is adequate as a data layer. The missing piece is a financial infrastructure layer that sits beneath the data exchange — one that handles payment capture, applies consistent and transparent commercial rules, automatically attributes revenue to the correct party, and delivers funds within a settlement cycle measured in hours or days rather than weeks.

This is what NetworkCore is built to do. As a neutral clearing and settlement layer connecting CPOs and Demand Partners, it absorbs the financial and operational complexity that currently sits as overhead across both sides of every roaming transaction. CPOs connect once and access aggregated demand without bilateral negotiation, receive their session revenue within 48 hours, and retain full pricing sovereignty — their published tariff is what reaches the driver, without modification. Demand Partners embed charging access through a single API, earn a transparent revenue share on every session, and have settlement, invoicing, reconciliation and compliance handled automatically.

The broader lesson from card payments and telecoms is that the clearing infrastructure, once built, becomes invisible. Nobody thinks about the settlement architecture behind a Mastercard transaction. It simply works. EV charging settlement will follow the same arc. The industry is in the messy middle — technically functional, financially fragile — and the companies building the financial layer now are the ones that will define how the market works at scale.