A charging card also works at somebody else’s charge points.

A driver who is handed a charging card wants to charge everywhere.

Any single provider, though, runs only a small share of the charge points in the country.

Operators therefore open their charge points to cards from other providers. Those arrangements are called roaming.

A broker often sits between provider and operator and bundles many such arrangements.

An example: a driver holds a card from provider A against a station run by operator B.

B supplies the electricity, A invoices the driver.

What B receives from A is settled between the two of them.

The driver has one card and one invoice.

Before roaming arrangements existed, every network needed a card of its own.

Cards you never issued turn up at your charge points.

You decide which provider may charge with you.

That decision covers either your whole estate or a single charging group.

Block a provider and the station turns its cards away.

The volumes per provider appear in your report at the end of the month.

That is the figure you invoice the provider for.

Charging providers are created by the operator of the installation. Their cards work at every charge point.

Each organisation can block a provider across its whole estate or for individual charging groups.

A card that was turned away shows up as a message in the organisation’s settings.

The volume per provider sits in the same report as the organisation’s own cards. The export goes to accounting as an Excel file.