Ep. 18: Niall Riddell, CEO & Co‑Founder of Paua, on Aggregating UK EV Charging Networks, Simplifying Fleet Billing, and the Promise of Plug and Charge

0:11 Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

0:40 Hello and welcome to today's episode with Neil Riddell, co-founder and CEO of Paua, the London-based startup that's redefining how businesses can charge electric fleets. After 15 years in large energy utilities, including the French behemoth EDF, and an MBA that convinced him that to learn about business he had to create a business, Neil hung up his corporate boots in 2020 to launch Paua - that's P-A-U-A, not Power. Since its official debut, Paua has become the UK's largest EV charging network aggregator, stitching together over 60,000 connectors

1:18 from more than 40 charge point operators into a single card and app solution, earning Start-up of the Year at the EVIES 2023 awards. Today, we'll dig into why public charging still costs more than diesel, how salary sacrifice schemes and BYD's Tesla look-alikes are reshaping UK fleets, and the tantalizing promise of plug and charge to make charging as seamless as a Tesla on a supercharger. Let's get started.

1:47 Alright, Neil, how are you today? Thanks for making it to the podcast. I'm very well, thank you ever so much for inviting me along. Yes, and for the listeners who don't know you, maybe you can give a short intro about yourself. Yeah, absolutely. So hello, my name is Neil. I'm from a company called Paua. Some of you who are watching online will be going, why can't this guy spell? I'm Neil spelled N-I-A-L-L and Paua spelled P-A-U-A.

2:13 We provide an electric vehicle charging and payment solution here in the UK. My background is I spent 15 years in large energy utilities, realized that if I really wanted to make a difference, I was going to have to go and do it myself. So we set up Paua back in 2020, very much with the view of simplifying the journey for businesses with electric vehicles. Thanks for that. And so you were at EDF, I think one of the largest energy corporates before. How did you get

2:41 from EDF to the concrete idea of a business opportunity? This is quite a long, complicated story, but let's do it. There are two or three pieces in here. One of the pieces is I'm an engineer by training. I was very fortunate - I got sent to do an MBA back in 2009, 2010 by a former boss of mine. He said, you're going to learn loads of stuff. And one of the things I learned about

3:07 was business, surprisingly. And I came away from my MBA realizing that if I really wanted to understand business, I was probably going to have to build one myself. So there I was in 2010 going, I should probably be an entrepreneur. It took 10 years, but over those 10 years I sat and looked at marketplaces and all the things I thought I needed to know to build a business. And as it happened, I wasn't particularly good at climbing up the greasy pole

3:31 of a large corporate, and ended up inside the innovation team. One of the things we were looking at at EDF inside that innovation area was electric vehicles. This was sort of 2017, 2018. Clearly a big trend, clearly a lot of interest - some interesting models coming to market. It was the time of the new Renault Zoe, the Jaguar I-Pace got launched around about then, the second generation Nissan Leaf. So there were some interesting,

3:56 mainstream vehicles coming along. I was like, this is really cool - what are all the challenges? Started to open up those challenges and realized that this ecosystem of many, many different charge point operators out on the road, with different apps, different cards, and an entirely fragmented experience, meant there was an opportunity there. And I was like, actually, you know what, maybe the time is about right for me to step away and go and build my own business, and basically go

4:22 from being what we described as a chicken entrepreneur to an entrepreneur. What's the concept of a chicken entrepreneur? Maybe you can elaborate on that one. So there are two things about the chicken entrepreneur. Firstly, there's the concept of a chicken - you're a bit of a chicken, a bit of a coward, you're too scared to make it work. The other one is a story that a friend of mine used to tell, which is the idea of a ham and egg shop, and you've got

4:46 a pig and a chicken walking down the road. The pig and the chicken are having a conversation, and the chicken goes, I think we should open a business - we'll make a ham and egg shop. And the pig turns back to the chicken and goes, I don't think you'll be fully involved. You'll only be participating. Because ultimately, the pig has to fully sacrifice himself to provide the ham for the ham and egg shop, whereas the chicken only has to participate in providing

5:07 the eggs. So the idea of a chicken entrepreneur is someone who's not fully participating, whereas the pig is really getting fully involved. Love the story - the analogies are the best. And so now you are the pig, so to say. What makes your life a pig? Very good. What makes my life a pig? I mean, if we go back to the basics, here in the UK we're still only about

5:38 3% of all vehicles on the road being electric. So we've kind of broken out of that early adopter phase - you know, people who are exploring, innovating, it's cool, I want to try something different - into the beginning of the early majority. And there's a valley of death in there, where people go, it's not good enough, I expected it to be like X and it's actually like Y. We are living in that world. We've got a lot of drivers who are confident, and

6:05 They've been doing it a few years now, they were some of the innovators, and we've got a bunch of drivers who just aren't impressed by the way the world actually works. So what we're trying to do right at this moment - and that's the gap we're trying to bridge - is transition that gap between the expectation of what the world should be like and what it's actually like. We've got this dangerous territory where we've really got to prove ourselves to the first of

6:28 that early majority that we are capable of handling reliability of chargers, the experience at the charge point, fraud, enabling people to charge at home and still be fairly reimbursed when they charge at home, enabling people to share depots, simplifying and streamlining the whole "where is the charger" - the find, charge and pay experience. And that is basically, if you break it down, that is the challenge I'm dealing with every day: how to make it appear and make it

6:59 as easy as possible for the drivers to find, charge and pay on their journey. So to set this into context - it was great already - if you had to prioritise, what are the biggest things that don't let you sleep at night? Challenges that you're addressing every day, the core of your daily business. There are two ways I'd look at that, two ways to answer this question. One is

7:26 as an entrepreneur running a small business, what is it that keeps me awake at night operating in this marketplace, and what are the challenges that we really face? As an entrepreneur, honestly, the biggest issue I face day to day is I have shiny object syndrome. Everything is exciting, everything's cool, I should give a little bit of time to this, a little bit of time to that - so I'm constantly being drawn between: should we talk about plug-in charge, or should it all be about

7:48 vehicle-to-grid, or should we be doing more energy flexibility? We're having that whole constant dynamic of conversation. But from an industry perspective, I think the one thing that we've got to really keep an eye on is cost. Ultimately we've moved away from the adopter who has gone, "I'm doing this because I want a Tesla, because a Tesla's a status symbol, I'm happy to pay a bit more to drive a Tesla," into a world where commercial businesses are making financially based decisions. And

8:17 the bit that we just haven't solved here in the UK is it simply costs more to charge in public than it does for a litre of diesel. And that's where we've got a real problem we need to overcome - be it through economies of scale, changes to taxation, looking at things on a total cost of ownership basis. Whatever the method is, we need to help those businesses who are now starting to approach this marketplace and say, "Yeah, I can see electric vehicles

8:46 is happening, but it looks quite expensive." How do we help them understand how they can reduce their costs, manage their costs, and ultimately give them a basic business case? And that includes the operational impacts of driving EVs. How do they get a business case that says, "You know what, the right thing for me to do right now is buy 100, 1,000 electric vans so that I can replace my fleet with electric today." So that's very insightful. Just to put it

9:14 again in context, one step back: Paua in essence, I think, is an MSP, in terms of positioning in the market. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit for the listeners - we have done some one-on-ones in some episodes, with Thomas Dava from Hubject for example; I can recommend going back to relisten to that episode. But yeah, maybe you can elaborate on your positioning and also give a

9:41 bit of an introduction to the company more generically. Yeah, that's a really good challenge because, as with any new industry, particularly where technology is involved, we love our TLAs - let's get loads of three-letter acronyms in and complex language to try and describe what it is we do. I was on another podcast recently and got told off for using too many three-letter acronyms. In effect, we could be regarded as an MSP, a Mobility Service Provider - we provide

10:08 services to people on the go. The way we've looked at the market is slightly different. You've effectively got two broad groups of customers. You've got B2C customers - business to consumer, direct to an individual who's driving - and you've got B2B customers, so a business-to-business service. In that case, our business provides a service to another business. We're in the business predominantly of servicing other businesses' electric vehicle charging needs. We don't do infrastructure -

10:40 we're literally just a software player, and we aggregate many types of software together, be that in your home, in your workplace, or out on the road. Each of these is a fragmented software platform, a software layer. You go into a depot, you might find some Monta, some Ampeco, some BP - well, BP has just announced they're leaving workplace, so no BP in the workplace anymore - but you might have had some PodPoint or something else in your workplace. At home, you might

11:09 have a Zappi, you might have an Indra charger, you might have a Wallbox charger. And then when you get out on the road, by my count there are 120 public charge point operators, each of them with a slightly different brand, slightly different way of working - and that is a very fragmented layer. What we're doing is bringing integrations with each of these layers together, and clearly there's plenty of work to be done in that area. But we're integrating at multiple levels to bring

11:36 All that kilowatt hours of charging data and pricing data to the surface. When we can surface all of that pricing data, we can then tell the various parties who paid for what and whether someone else owes someone else money. The really big challenge in here is when you drove a petrol or diesel vehicle, you went to the petrol station, you paid for your petrol. If it was your company vehicle, your boss paid for your petrol. Suddenly, when you charge at home, that whole flow reverses. You're

12:04 now charging with your personal electricity bill, so you are personally paying the electricity company for the electricity that goes into your company vehicle. That's relatively easy to understand: you reverse the payment flow and you pay the driver for what they used at home. It becomes horribly complicated when that vehicle is used for both personal and business use. So imagine a middle management driver. They've been given a company car as a perk, they're told to drive to a conference in the north of England, so off

12:37 they drive to the north of England, they come back, they pay to charge in public, they charged it a bit at home, and then they go and take the kids to the seaside at the weekend. Who pays for what bit of electricity that went into whose vehicle, and how do you - in my language - slice and dice that money so that all of the home charging, workplace charging, and public charging is suitably allocated, particularly when public charging's at 85% and home charging's at 10%? That is

13:05 a complex piece of maths. It's a complex piece of maths that we're spending a lot of time automating, capturing all the data, allocating it correctly, and ensuring that we can then devise the right answer to the question of who pays whom for those business miles that were driven. And that in there is where there's a lot of fun and games. Yeah, very well described, I think. Yeah, you definitely have a charismatic and simple way of putting things.

13:31 You didn't use too much jargon there. I hope the listeners - I'm happy to use jargon if anyone wants it. Exactly, yeah. I think in the Insider's Guide to Energy, your other podcast that you're running, there you use a bit more - there's a more geeky side as well. It's quite nice to sometimes go a bit geeky because it depends on who's listening. Some people are like, "this guy simplified it so much, I understood

13:55 all of that." It's like, actually there are layers to that onion-peeling exercise we need to go through as we become more technically aware. One of the things I'm having to do constantly is keep this story running of how we communicate with customers, communicate with people who are new to this space. I had a situation the other day where for the first time I was engaging with a customer who'd never done anything in EV, and I was like, well, how do you do that,

14:19 how do you bring that story together? So yeah, I had lots of fun and games. Yeah, and it's already interesting as well that you do B2B, and that the whole infrastructure layer that you described is especially for the B2B space. So that's also, I guess, differentiating yourself from the larger players that might be out there, right? The large utilities, some of the likes you worked with before. If you have to describe the USP as well - that you choose

14:46 your battles, so to say. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of features around business that are really important for us. We've always fundamentally believed since the beginning that by bringing data sets and information together, we can provide a layer of value to the customer that you can't in the B2C arena. When you speak to an individual driver on the street about their charging experience, they're after things like convenience, lowest cost possible, make it easy. Which you can do. But if your

15:15 customer is just price-driven, then all you're doing is discounts on networks - that's the entire proposition that the customer ends up with. In our business arena, we get really complicated questions like, "I'm adopting electric HGVs. Where can I charge them?" And suddenly you need to go and classify all of the public charging infrastructure and ask: which ones are big enough to handle an HGV? Where will it go? How long will it be there? Does it need to book? Can these guys handle booking?

15:42 How do we manage payment? We've had some scenarios where charge points will cut off at a certain limit because they will only dispense about 125 kWh. And if you need to put 400 kWh into your HGV, suddenly you've got to charge it three times. So there are funny little quirks that we're starting to discover as we solve more and more of our business customers' problems. Yeah, very interesting. I think you also described in one post recently as well where

16:10 it was all about the future of MSPs and direct payments. I think that shows a bit of the complexity, right - that if direct pay doesn't solve the issue of finding the right chargers for an HGV, you know. Yeah, there's a fascinating question here because, in theory, a credit card can pay for anything. And a credit card can pay for anything, and that introduces an element of risk for a business because a business might not want to give all

16:33 its drivers a credit card. So then you start talking about locking your credit card down to certain codes that are used for certain activities, like only pay for charging. Unfortunately, charging has been classified as parking in some places and in other places has been classified as fuel. So if you do lock it down to charging, it doesn't work everywhere. And the credit card can't tell you how many kWh are dispensed, where the charger is, what the route might be - you lose all that.

16:59 functionality. The question you then have is, OK, so let's not do credit cards, let's do something else. What do those layers look like? And then you have to start to unpick, well, you could do a mobile app start, so I'm going to send a digital signal here from my phone to a server, which is our server, another server to the charge point operator's server, and from there to the actual charge point. So now you've got lots of connectivity you need to handle. Now that has faults

17:24 and problems and delays and things, so that experience might not be great. What if you just did a card and you pulled up and you touched your card and it started? Great, there's direct digital authentication at the charger. But all of a sudden, you go, oh, well, that card could be cloned, it could be copied, it could be lost. And all those questions start to emerge. I think the one I'm excited about, but we're just on the cusp of but not quite there, is

17:49 ISO 15118, which is the international standard for plug and charge. It also does vehicle to grid, but plug and charge is what we're interested in. Plug and charge is a token on the charger, a token on the car, a handshake between the two, and the driver experience is much, much simplified, much like your Tesla charging experience. So that experience of pulling up, plugging in, authenticating, simplifies that driver experience, it creates a layer of - what's the word I'm looking

18:22 for - security between the driver and the charge point, and enables some of that ecosystem to be a bit slicker. So that's something we're excited about, haven't quite seen happening yet. When it does happen, I think it will start to translate into smoother, more seamless experiences, but we need a lot of different parties to move forward to make that really work. Makes sense. In talking geographies, I think you are very much based in the UK and focused at the moment only on the

18:51 UK market. And nevertheless, I'm sure you're familiar with other markets. How would you compare the UK market on what you're doing in particular with other geographies? It's a really interesting question because I get asked this a lot. I would start by arguing that the UK was behind. Part of the reason that we exist as a business is because Europe as a whole adopted a sort of collaborative roaming mindset from early on in its

19:20 journey. And, you know, the OCPI standard coming out of the Netherlands - you can quite quickly see that there's very much a European influence to what it is that we're trying to replicate here in the UK. We're an island, we behave like islanders, so it had to be British, and then of course we had these British companies early on going, I don't want to work with them, I don't want to work

19:43 with them, so we had quite a lot of tension and we still have that, whereby I would argue that we're one of the market leaders in terms of aggregating all the networks together. We're probably running about 55 to 60% of all the charge point connectors, maybe 80% in rapids. But we've still got tension with certain parties in the market who don't believe in this, don't think it's the right thing to do, and therefore the consumer unfortunately is disadvantaged by the egos of some large

20:08 corporations. As a consequence, I think there's a lot we can learn from Europe about the way that we work together. But as a country that buys cars, we buy quite a lot of cars. We do drive on the wrong side of the road, which doesn't help us at all. So it does mean that we sometimes see that impact of right-hand drive versus left-hand drive impacting the market flows of vehicles. So we do see there's a bit

20:31 of a laggard opportunity in there, but ultimately as a car-buying country we're 2nd or 3rd I think behind Germany and France. Germany and France are obviously huge market leaders in this space. Everything coming out of the Benelux region has driven a lot of this dynamic, so Western Europe as a whole is pushing forward. Norway is a whole other story in its own right. But you then start to look at what are the outlier countries now that we know that

21:00 Western Europe is moving and adopting. What are the outliers? A couple of countries I've got an eye on at the moment are Spain - I think they're behind in the transition and I think they're going to accelerate quite quickly - Poland, quite an interesting one to watch because Poland's got a lot of car buyers, it's a decent sized country, it's got large ranges to cover, but I think we're going to see some changes and transition in Poland. And then Italy. I think Italy's really

21:26 fun. It doesn't have a lot of charge point operators, so when I'm looking at a marketplace, I'm looking for fragmentation, a challenge to overcome, to bring networks together. Italy doesn't have that, it's got 2 or 3 big players. So as a consequence it might be harder for us to create a value proposition in Italy. But they're 3 markets which I'm quite interested and intrigued by over the next 6 to 12 months. And we mustn't forget that ultimately Northern Ireland and Ireland share a

21:52 physical border. So Ireland is a logical market for us to look at because it is right next door. It speaks the right language as well, which makes our lives easier. Yeah, interesting. And talking more about EV adoption in the UK, what have been the drivers in the UK? There's the fleet emission quotas in Europe and then some incentives. Maybe you can get through what's there. And I also recently saw BYD being, I think, the number

22:22 One overseas European market. Is there like suddenly BYDs everywhere? How is your perception of the market and the other drivers? Yeah, that's a cool question. So I mean, back in the beginning, the early adoption was done by the early adopters because it was cool. The choice was limited. They picked one of the two or three manufacturers that provided an electric car that didn't look like a G-Wiz or a little mobility machine. And quite quickly you had Zoes, the Nissan

22:50 Leaf, and the Teslas on the road, quickly followed by the I-Pace. And for a long time the market ran like that. What we've seen is various emission standards starting to appear. So currently the really big ones that are driving the transition are the ZEV mandate, which requires the automotive manufacturers to sell a certain amount of cars to enable them to hit emissions-based thresholds. And that is having an impact. I think it's a little bit vague in the van space.

23:18 The UK government has set some objectives about the percentage of new sales in cars and vans. Cars is tracking OK towards where it should be, but it looks like vans has got a lot of catching up to do. So as a consequence, vans might be the tricky one to solve. I think the other piece that's really driving the transition is a UK-specific tax mechanism. It's something called salary sacrifice, and the way that salary sacrifice works is you give up

23:47 some of your gross salary - you sacrifice it to your employer - and in return for sacrificing your gross salary, the employer gives you access to an electric car. What it means is your net salary goes down, but because you're not paying as much tax, the net salary reduction is less than if you had leased or acquired that car yourself. That tax efficiency can save up to 20 or 30% on a car, which is a good amount. So as a consequence of saving that 20 or

24:16 30%, we've seen a lot of companies adopt salary sacrifice schemes, which has led to a lot of sort of middle-management-type cars going into the marketplace. And if you think about it, they're a perfect group for that early adopter - just after innovators, they're a little bit wealthier, they've got a stable job with a large corporate employer. And therefore the idea of them taking on Audi e-trons, the Jaguar I-Pace type ecosystem, the new Renaults - you're

24:43 starting to see all of these things flowing through that salary sacrifice market. And as you mentioned, BYD is available on some of these schemes. I think what I'm noticing is the BYD Tesla lookalike model thing is quite at work. You walk down the street, you see a car coming towards you and you go, is it a Tesla or is it a BYD? I think there's been some cross-alignment between the brand look and feel that means that BYD has been able to

25:10 steal a decent market share here in the UK. They're affordable. You put them through a salary sacrifice scheme, they're even more affordable. You're buying a high-performance vehicle with 250, 300, 400 miles potentially of range. And actually a lot of people will sit and go, you know what, for my daily commute, why not? So I think we're seeing middle management and salary sacrifice schemes drive quite a lot of uptake. But I think the space that's probably lagging at the moment is

25:38 vans - big fleets adopting large numbers of vans. I think that's struggling. And then the exciting one for me, just because of pure scale, is the UK government's doing a lot of work on what they call the ZEHI programme, which is the Zero Emission HGV and Infrastructure demonstrator. So that will place several hundred electric heavy goods vehicles on the road, and we're starting to see them arriving - and they are big beasts. So we're starting to see some of those really big

26:08 vehicles hit the market right now. Well, very interesting. And also recently Octopus announced a partnership with BYD that made quite some news internationally - this £300 monthly fee where you get a V2G package which makes driving essentially free. I haven't looked into the details, but how was that perceived in the UK? What's your personal perception? You mentioned in the beginning that you're dealing a lot with V2G and smart charging type of

26:40 ideas. What's your take on that one, and especially the UK being maybe the best market in the world for those? Yeah, let's start from the beginning on V2G. We're an island. Islands are bad for some things but really good for others. In this particular case we're really good for ancillary services for our electricity network. So we don't have a perfect connection to Europe - we have interconnectors, we've got lots

27:10 of generation, it's mixed, it's variable, but it's on an island. So we see quite a lot of variability in our electricity system. We also pride ourselves on having very high reliability on that electricity network, and that is only a function of the fact that we pay decent money to people to provide frequency response, short-term response, and ultimately the stability that our market needs to keep the lights on effectively. It means that we pay quite a lot of money into

27:38 these markets, which means that from a vehicle-to-grid perspective, there's a decent chunk of revenue associated with being able to provide flexibility from your battery. We did a lot of work on this through the 2018–2019 period. Numerous Innovate UK trials have taken place - government-funded trials demonstrating elements of vehicle-to-grid. So when Octopus made their announcement, there were two things that went through my mind. One was: brilliant, that's what we said we'd

28:08 Five years ago, and they're actually doing it. So it's great to see it coming to life in the context of what it should be able to do. You know, that piece of the puzzle makes it really quite exciting, because now all of a sudden you've got this opportunity to go, well, actually, this marketplace is happening. I'd like to see some on the road, I'd like to get some real customer feedback to really believe that what they're stating is

28:33 true. But they're Octopus, they're capable of making stuff happen, so I'm excited by what that will mean. The second thing that went through my head was it got very little mainstream media. It got a lot of industry news, it got a lot of social media, and I couldn't help thinking that was very purposeful. Going back to this idea of the early adopter and the innovator, you know, the innovators are the ones who are excited by that kind of proposition. So when that

29:00 happened, I was kind of like, actually, there's a really interesting opportunity in here to push this into the hands of the innovators, because the innovators will complain, but when an innovator complains they go, "Oh, it'd be great if you could do this and this and that," rather than going, "It's terrible, it doesn't work." It would be much more of a feedback exercise. So I do believe that the channels that it was communicated

29:23 out to were very purposeful - that the people who recognise what the value looks like are the people who are the early innovators and will get value from it. And I'm excited to see whether it will really have the impact in the market that I think it deserves. Interesting. And how do you see the opportunity for you, as Paua, for V2G and smart charging? I mean, as you hinted at in

29:49 the beginning, there are plenty of challenges nowadays that you tackle, but I'm sure you can also try to leverage some of these fleets at home, on the business side, or even in public - as we're seeing in Amsterdam, I think, which has some nice pilots in public charging already for smart charging. Yeah, it's got swings and roundabouts, hasn't it? If you are a parcel delivery company, or you're an

30:18 HGV taking freight from one end of the country to the other, the time it takes to charge is an operational impact. So if you get to a location and you plug in to charge because you're going from A to B, you need to get as much juice in that vehicle as you possibly can in that short period of time to get back on the road, because the time away from the road is time you're not earning money. Get back on the road and do the

30:40 job. So if it's sat inside operational hours, I don't see a huge opportunity for V2G on rapid charging. I don't see any opportunity for flex either. In fact, give me as much as you can while I'm here because I need to go and get on with my day job. Everything outside of that is fair game. So you suddenly go, that van driver takes his van home at night and he plugs in on the street and he did 70 or 80 miles and he's going to

31:07 pull that in 6 or 7 hours from the on-street charger. He's going to go and sleep for at least 8 of those hours, so you've got an hour, and you know it's a bit of breakfast and time - he's not going to work an 18-hour day. So suddenly you go, actually, I've got a decent chunk of time to charge this vehicle. Smart charging on street, smart charging in car parks starts to make sense. You know what, he got back

31:30 home at 4:30, 5 o'clock, plugged in - let's just sit it there for a bit, let it run, and then, you know what, 10, 11 o'clock, energy demand is dropping, price is dropping, let's push that vehicle onto charge. Give it what it needs, and then by 6 o'clock in the morning he's fully charged. By 8 o'clock in the morning he picks the vehicle up and off he goes. That is very logical. Does it also give enough time in

31:54 that window to do a bit of V2G? Possibly. Here's where the fun bit begins. It's less around the technical capability to manage the energy load and more around the commercial implications. Because now that driver has plugged in - and maybe he didn't need to charge, maybe he just plugged in because he was told to. Who gets the commercial benefit? Does it go to the business as the asset owner, as the person who told the driver to plug in, and the business gets the benefit

32:22 maybe through cheaper cost of charging? Or does it go to the driver, and the individual gets the benefit? And I think that is where we're going to see some really interesting dynamics emerging. You can see a scenario where someone goes, "I'll take an EV because I can take it home, I can plug it in, and I'll get all the money paid to me - from my business vehicle that they paid for, I'll get all the money from charging it at night." The other side, where

32:45 the business goes, "Ooh, I'm going to switch to EVs, I give them to all my drivers, they're going to drive and I'm going to get free charging." So there's quite an interesting question in here. It's a bit like the old days when you had a credit card and you got airline points. You know, did the driver get the benefit, or the person paying for the credit card - you know, transfer the benefit of the airline points to the individual.

33:07 Are we going to see the same thing? Is it going to be different or not? The other fun one is, let's say I go to work in my van, I happen to spend a day at work and recharge my van at work. I then drive home at night and plug it in. And for whatever reason, a V2G event takes place that night. I discharge my battery into my home to reduce my demand on the grid.

33:31 And then it recharges overnight. But I also have a relationship with my boss, which says that when I charge my vehicle at home, I get paid. Do I get paid twice? Once for discharging it and once for reimbursing the driver at home? And that monetary flow, that value of the electron and that value of flexibility - I think it works at a B2C level, a commercial, an individual level. I think when you enter the world of businesses and the relationship between the asset

33:57 owner and the individual plugging it in, that's where I think some really spicy stuff to get stuck into. Great anecdotes, great examples. Thanks for that, Neil. As we're running out of time, maybe a last message you would like to give the listeners, and how they can reach you. Yeah. Hello everyone, my name's Neil. I'm at paua.com - a four-letter URL, which is quite rare these days - and you can find me over there. I'm on LinkedIn if you want

34:23 to hunt me down. And I guess if there was one final thought or wish that I could offer: if you're a policymaker listening to this and you don't drive an electric vehicle, please don't write policy on electric vehicles until you actually drive one, because we really need regulators and legislators who understand the real experience. All right, thanks a lot, Neil, and have a good rest of the day. Cheers, man.

34:48 And that brings us to the end of another deep dive on Smart Charge by RiDERgy. A big thank you to Neil for pulling back the curtain on life at Paua, where every day is a masterclass in wrestling fragmentation into submission. Fresh insights from today's chat: shiny object syndrome in practice - between plug-in charging, vehicle-to-grid, and energy flex, Neil admits the toughest leadership challenge is knowing which shiny new idea to chase and which to table for tomorrow's road map. The art of slice-and-dice billing: we

35:21 heard how Paua's software captures every kWh, whether at home, in the depot, or on the public network, and then algorithmically allocates costs down to the mile. That's the secret sauce that turns messy data from 120+ operators into neat invoices for businesses. Credit card conundrums and HGV quirks: who knew that public charging transactions are sometimes coded as parking or fuel on a corporate card? And for heavy goods vehicles, you may need three separate chargers to fill a battery, adding operational headaches that Paua is busy

35:55 smoothing out. UK roaming leader status: the UK leads Europe in network aggregation. Paua covers up to 60% of all connectors and nearly 80% of rapids. But large incumbents still resist true roaming - those corporate egos, Neil warns, leave drivers paying the price. On the horizon, beyond ISO 15118: plug and charge is just the beginning. True mass-market impact will come when smart charging windows, dynamic tariffs, and full V2G stacks all converge, and when regulators finally clear the runway. If you're passionate about stripping complexity from

36:36 fleet electrification, subscribe to Smart Charge by RiDERgy, leave us a review, and share your own roaming or V2G questions on LinkedIn. To see Paua in action, head to paua.com and follow Neil on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. Keep innovating, keep charging smarter, and we'll catch you next time.