Fixing the Disconnect: A Financial Blueprint for Billing Challenges in EV Charging

Europe’s roads are going electric and the EV adoption in Europe is increasing. Battery-electric car registrations in the EU continue to grow: around 1.4 million were added in 2024, and early 2025 shows a 28.4% increase year-on-year. Despite a slowdown in Germany, the EU trend remains positive. By 2023, battery-electric and hybrid vehicles reached a 48.3% market share, nearly matching petrol and diesel cars.

The infrastructure is also racing to keep pace, with the global number of charging points expected to grow fivefold to 15 million by 2030.

For Charging Point Operators (CPOs), this growth isn’t just an opportunity — it’s a financial and operational challenge.

Scaling networks and ensuring reliability is one thing; managing high transaction volumes, navigating cross-border VAT, and reconciling payments across multiple partners is another. And it’s becoming more complex by the day.

So, what are the financial challenges holding CPOs back from scaling as fast as demand requires? To get more insights, we spoke with the experts behind Riverty’s EV Charging Finance Suite. Here’s what they had to say about the biggest financial bottlenecks in EV Charging.

Cash flow challenges: Stabilizing revenue in a growing market

For CPOs, having access to working capital is the difference between scaling fast and falling behind.

Expansion requires heavy upfront investments, from installing high-power DC chargers that can cost €80,000–100,000 per unit to major civil work—digging trenches, laying thick power cables, upgrading distribution boards, and ensuring stable fiber or ethernet connectivity. Efficient cash flow management frees up liquidity to focus on the development of assets that generate significant profits

And the spending doesn’t stop at installation. Ongoing maintenance contracts ensure uptime, with technicians on call to troubleshoot issues that can’t be resolved remotely. Yet even as costs remain constant, cash flow is often unpredictable due to three key factors:

Stalled Payments: Settlement delays between CPOs, roaming networks, and payment providers can restrict liquidity, making it harder to reinvest in infrastructure or cover costs.
Revenue Leakage: Issues such as billing errors, fraudulent transactions, or failed payments silently erode profit margins. These hidden losses eat into margins, impacting profitability and slowing growth.
Operational Inefficiencies: Reconciling Charge Detail Records (CDRs) across multiple systems creates bottlenecks, delaying revenue and increasing accounting workloads. This challenge is compounded by the role of aggregators, which often introduce sub-CPOs and sub-MSPs without providing clear customer attribution. Without full transaction visibility, invoice matching becomes a slow, manual process—leading to delayed payments and greater financial uncertainty.

To address cash flow challenges, CPOs can explore strategies that improve efficiency and operational resilience. Automated EV Charging billing systems reduce manual intervention and speed up reconciliation, ensuring payments are processed accurately and on time. Additionally, real-time payment visibility helps operators identify and address discrepancies early, enhancing financial clarity.

By integrating revenue streams like direct, roaming, and bilateral payments, CPOs can create a unified view of their operations, reducing administrative burdens while supporting long-term growth. Small adjustments like these can significantly strengthen financial health and scalability.

Roaming agreements: Simplifying interoperability

Roaming agreements are essential to enable drivers to seamlessly charge across EV networks — but create significant complexity for operators. The lack of standardized billing and data-sharing processes often leads to disputes, delayed settlements, and inconsistent user experiences.

Emerging technologies like Plug & Charge (powered by ISO 15118) offer a solution by automating authentication, billing, and charging. This innovation simplifies operations and enhances the driver experience—but for CPOs, implementation comes with investment challenges.

Not all chargers and CSMS platforms support PnC natively, requiring operators to upgrade hardware, integrate with compatible CSMS providers, and ensure backend alignment. While the long-term benefits include streamlined payments and reduced transaction friction, the upfront costs mean that operators must carefully assess their infrastructure readiness before adopting PnC at scale.

Cross-border payments: Navigating complexity with flexibility

In Europe’s diverse EV charging market, cross-border payments introduce challenges requiring careful navigation. For CPOs, these include managing multi-currency transactions, ensuring VAT compliance across 27 EU member states, and adhering to varied regional regulations. Such complexities can lead to inefficiencies, delayed payments, and disputes if not addressed systematically.

European customers demand flexibility, further complicating billing. Offering options like pay-as-you-go for tourists or subscription models for local users enhances user satisfaction but requires precise financial orchestration.

Automation and standardization are key, but the challenge goes beyond just getting it right once. CPOs deal with credit notes, retrospective billing corrections, and complex tariff structures that stretch back months. Without a system designed to track and adjust financial data over time, inaccuracies build up—leading to lost revenue, compliance risks, and audit complications.

EV Charging billing systems that automate VAT handling, multi-period reconciliations, and cross-border payment adjustments ensure that CPOs stay in control, eliminating financial blind spots before they become expensive problems.

The road ahead for CPOs

The EV charging industry is on a steep growth trajectory, with forecasts predicting it will surpass $104 billion by 2035. However, financial and operational challenges, like cash flow management, interoperability, and compliance with evolving regulations such as the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR), must be addressed to unlock this potential.

And let’s not forget: working capital is the real enabler of growth. CPOs need a financial backbone that bridges the gap from charge to cash—one that doesn’t just process transactions but also automates reconciliation, streamlines tax compliance, and ensures liquidity. Those who leverage scalable, automated financial systems today won’t just keep pace with the industry—they’ll lead it.

Financial Solutions for the EV-Charging Industry

Riverty simplifies payment management for e-charging stations. Reduce your accounting costs by up to 30% with our automated processes.