By Jean-Philippe Niedergang, Acting Group CEO / EMEA-Pacific-LatAm CEO, Castles Technology
Europe’s electric vehicle transition is, at its core, a distributed device management problem. Hundreds of thousands of charging points are being deployed across motorway networks, car parks, residential streets and retail forecourts and each one is a connected endpoint that has to be monitored, updated, secured and managed remotely, often for a decade or more, without anyone physically visiting the site.
Most coverage of this rollout focuses on energy: grid capacity, charging speed, network density. Less attention goes to the question that determines whether any of that infrastructure actually works at scale: can these distributed devices be managed as a connected fleet, or does each one become an isolated piece of hardware that requires manual intervention every time something changes?
Every charging point is an IoT endpoint
Strip away the energy delivery function and a public EV charger is a textbook connected device. It needs persistent or intermittent connectivity to report status and usage data. It needs to receive firmware and software updates without a technician on site. It needs to authenticate transactions, communicate with central management systems, and keep operating reliably in outdoor, unattended conditions across a wide range of environments and climates.
Every function built into that charger, including the payment terminal, has to meet the same operational standard as the rest of the device. A charger that can be remotely diagnosed and updated, but whose payment system requires a site visit to reconfigure, has a fleet management problem hiding inside it. A connected fleet is only as manageable as its least connected component.
Interoperability is the foundation, not a feature
This is where the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP), developed and maintained by the Open Charge Alliance, has done a great deal of quiet, foundational work. OCPP gives charging stations and back-end management systems a shared language regardless of manufacturer, which means an operator is not locked into a single vendor’s hardware or software stack to manage their network. It has become close to a de facto standard precisely because large-scale, multi-vendor deployments cannot function efficiently without it.
The payment function inside a charger has historically not been held to the same standard. In some deployments, payment systems remain tied to proprietary networks, with limited ability to be remotely reconfigured, updated, or integrated into the broader device management stack the rest of the charger relies on. That is increasingly a fleet management liability rather than simply a commercial inconvenience.
That gap, however, is closing. Just as OCPP standardised the conversation between chargers and their management systems, open payment-acceptance standards – notably the nexo standards, built on ISO 20022 – give terminals, point-of-sale systems and acquirers a shared, vendor-neutral language. They are, in effect, the OCPP of the payment layer: the mechanism that lets the payment component be integrated, updated and managed with the same openness as everything else on the device, instead of remaining a closed island inside an otherwise connected machine.
In practice, this is what Android-based unattended terminals managed through a terminal management system (TMS) are built to deliver. The payment endpoint becomes software-defined: firmware, configuration, certificates and security updates are pushed over the air, using the same remote, fleet-level operating model the rest of the charger already depends on. An operator managing thousands of distributed endpoints needs every component to be manageable through that same software-driven approach.
Regulation is forcing the issue
Several regulatory frameworks are now converging on this gap. The Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) requires all new public charging stations above 50kW to accept open card payments, with existing stations required to retrofit by 1 January 2027. The European Accessibility Act introduces accessibility requirements for self-service terminals and PCI DSS 4.0 raises the security bar for unattended payment devices generally.
For an operator running a closed or proprietary payment system, meeting these requirements at scale typically means on-site hardware work across a large distributed fleet, a significant operational and cost burden. For an operator running open, connected, software-defined infrastructure, the same requirements can largely be addressed through remote deployment, in the same way OCPP-compliant networks handle firmware updates and protocol changes today.
The deadline is the immediate trigger but the underlying issue is whether the device management architecture was ever built to handle this kind of change remotely in the first place.
Where vehicle-to-infrastructure communication is heading
The endpoint itself is also evolving. As vehicles become more connected, the boundary between the car and the charging infrastructure is starting to blur. In-car payment credentials, vehicle-initiated authentication and machine-to-machine settlement are already emerging in pilot deployments, building on the same class of connected protocols, including newer iterations of OCPP that extend into vehicle-to-everything communication, that already standardise how chargers and back-end systems exchange data.
For this to function at scale, payment cannot remain a separate system that happens to sit next to the charging hardware. It needs to be a native part of the same connected architecture, exchanging data and authenticating transactions through the same protocols and the same remote management layer as everything else on the device.
Smart cities depend on the same architecture
This pattern extends far beyond individual charging points. Across European cities, transport networks, parking systems, EV charging infrastructure and public service kiosks are increasingly expected to operate as a connected, centrally manageable layer rather than a collection of isolated deployments. The smart city concept depends entirely on this kind of interoperable, remotely managed device architecture being applied consistently across every type of public-facing infrastructure.
Payment functionality is one part of that layer and it needs to be engineered with the same standards of openness, remote manageability and interoperability as every other connected component and not treated as a bolted-on transaction system.
The real infrastructure question
The success of Europe’s EV charging rollout will be determined by whether the full connected device, including the payment system inside it, can be managed, secured and updated remotely across an enormous, geographically distributed fleet. Right now, the charging points are going in fast but the bigger question is whether every part of that fleet, payments included, was actually built to be managed as connected infrastructure rather than as a collection of standalone hardware.
Author biography
Jean-Philippe Jean-Philippe Niedergang is responsible for driving strategic growth and strengthening Castles Technology’s presence across the Globe; he is also directly leading the teams from three critical regions of the Company. He has held pivotal leadership roles in renowned international organisations, such as Vice President of Southern Europe at Verifone, VP of Insurance Markets at Atos Origin, and VP Western Europe at American Express.
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