EV payment specialist Paythru has launched Paythru Contactless – an easy way for all EV chargers to offer contactless payment.
The forthcoming Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 mandate that all public charge points above 8 kW must enable users to pay by contactless. This will require many older chargepoints to add contactless payments within a year of the legislation coming into force.
Paythru Contactless is a ‘one-to-many’ approach, allowing multiple chargers to be connected, via the Paythru cloud, to a contactless payment terminal. The first application of Paythru Contactless is a suite of eMobility kiosks – developed in collaboration with Bright.Green – that can be deployed on any site with multiple chargers.
The kiosks are similar to parking payment terminals. Users park their car, walk to the kiosk, select their charger, and start the charge.
This solves an immediate problem for chargepoints without contactless readers, which includes 59% of rapid chargers . Instead of expensive electrical retrofitting of contactless readers, they can connect into the Paythru cloud using standard EV charging communication protocols (OCPP, OCPI), and offer contactless payments at the eMobility kiosk.
As well as contactless, the terminals support RFID tokens, such as those used by fleet charging schemes, and allow Chip & PIN payments, which some contactless users are required to make from time to time.
“By providing multiple payment and user experience options” says Sara Sloman, Chief Strategy Officer at Paythru, “we are ensuring charging is accessible to everyone”.
The kiosk can also be modified to meet the operator’s needs, including offering payments for other services, parking only prices, and loyalty and reward schemes. Receipts are accessible through scanning a QR code or providing a mobile number. And drivers can monitor their charging session on their phone by scanning the QR code on the kiosk screen.
The presence of a physical kiosk with a digital display also offers other benefits to chargepoint operators. The display can generate revenue advertising, local information to enrich the customer’s visit, or surveys to gather feedback.
Finally, the system has been designed to offer ‘Incremental Authorisation’ which dynamically secures funds throughout the charging session, rather than blocking large ‘pre-authoristation’ amounts upfront which sometimes take days to be returned, and are an increasing source of user frustration.
Sloman concludes:
The intricate and costly retrofitting of contactless card readers to every individual chargepoint is going to be really hard and expensive. But the new legalisation makes it clear that it has to happen.
We now have a far more elegant solution, made possible by our sophisticated payment technology and Bright.Green’s deep experience in unattended retail. That will make things much easier and cost-effective for those who need to add contactless to their chargepoints. And it will give all users the painless charging and payment experience that we deliver through all our work.
1 Only 41% of rapid and higher-powered chargepoints (50 kW+) have contactless debit or credit card payment as an option, according to The Office for Zero Emissions Vehicles:
