A fuel card was never a payment method. It was a control system.

Not a transaction at all.

Depot charging is energy drawn from the company’s own connection. There is no acquirer, no scheme, no merchant. What looks like a payments problem is actually a submetering and internal cost-allocation problem, and the tooling for it usually sits with facilities rather than with fleet.

Get the submetering wrong and the VAT position, the per-vehicle cost and the driver-level attribution all degrade at once — silently, because nothing fails.

The hardest one, and the one nobody scoped.

An employee charges a company vehicle on a domestic supply, at a domestic tariff, on a meter the employer does not control. The money has to travel backwards — from the employee to the company — which makes it a reimbursement question rather than a payment one, with a metering-accuracy problem underneath and a benefit-in-kind question on top.

Reimbursement is where fleet electrification programmes quietly lose credibility with drivers.

Treat it as a payments integration and it will not work. Treat it as a metering, tax and payroll question with a payment at the end and it will.

Four identities for one driver.

On public infrastructure a driver may be recognised by an RFID token, an eMSP app, a vehicle certificate under Plug & Charge, or not recognised at all when they pay ad-hoc by card. Each route produces a different record, held by a different party, arriving on a different timetable.

Reconciling one driver and one vehicle across those four identifiers is the central data failure of fleet electrification. Roaming settlement between charge point operator and e-mobility service provider sits underneath it, and the fleet sees only whatever survives that chain.