Change for electric car charging in South Africa
South African electric vehicle (EV) owners will soon be able to pay for their battery top-up with their bank cards instead of using a proprietary online account.
South African energy product company Rubicon recently announced it had partnered with payments facilitator Visa to roll out regular card payment terminals on its charging network at Smarter Mobility Africa 2024.
Rubicon e-mobility project manager Hilton Musk told MyBroadband that having the ability to pay for a charge session with a bank card would significantly improve customers’ charging experiences.
“Paying with your bank card or a digital wallet like Apple Pay or Google Wallet is the most natural and established mechanism that is already widely used by consumers,” Musk said.
In addition, the solution could create additional value-add opportunities for fleet cards, banking products, and loyalty programmes.
Musk said the bank card payment terminals will initially be rolled out as part of a three-month proof-of-concept at Rubicon’s six most-used DC fast charging stations.
These include its chargers at Mall of Africa, Canal Walk, Somerset Mall, Tyger Valley Shopping Centre, and Sasol Thanda Tau next to the N3.
While it waits for the specific point-of-sale devices it will use for its wider rollout, Rubicon will gather data on EV drivers’ reception of the system.
“Thereafter, we will be installing these at all our DC sites initially, and depending on the adoption rate, may expand it to our premium AC sites,” Musk said.
Rubicon had 71 public EV charging stations in South Africa by August 2024, making it the country’s second-largest charge point operator (CPOs). The vast majority of its stations have DC fast chargers.
As it stands, the norm for customers to interact with public EV charging systems in South Africa and several other countries has been a closed-loop system relying on RFID technology linked with proprietary digital wallets.
Even Tesla’s Supercharger network uses a proprietary wallet or account.
Musk believes the main reason this system had been the norm was that it was easier for CPOs and e-mobility service providers (eMSPs) to give customers RFID cards linked to some backend.
That enables user authentication without integrating interoperability with banking systems, which can be a long and expensive process.
Customers must load credit on their account before they can transact with the RFID card.
This approach has two downsides — it can give eMSPs some ability to see and control customer data, and it increases the barriers to entry in the market for new charging companies.
If bank card payment terminals become the standard, vehicle manufacturers will also no longer have to partner with CPOs or eMSPs to provide RFID cards to customers for charging at public stations.
All in the cloud
Musk said that the card payment system Rubicon has developed was hardware-agnostic, making it easy to roll out with any brand of charger.
The system is cloud-based, with no physical connection between the charger and payment terminal.
“Rubicon’s backend is capable of talking to the backend of an acquirer or aggregator, which in turn talks to the various banks to allow your bank card to become the authenticator, which then unlocks the charger to dispense energy,” Musk explained.
“The current system utilises a pre-authorisation for a specified amount, which we can set per charger through our backend,” he said.
“This will either stop charging when the amount is reached or charge a total less than that if the transaction is completed before the limit is reached.”
Musk said the next iteration of the system will have a completely new transaction flow, which will allow incremental billing for a transaction.
“That will update the transaction amount each minute as the charger communicates the accumulated energy used within the charge session,” Musk said.