S2 Ep. 6: Issam Tidjani, Co-Founder & CEO of Cariqa | Direct Payments for EV Charging, the End of Price Chaos and Where Smart Charging Fits In

In this episode Claudio Geyken speaks with Issam Tidjani, Co-Founder and CEO of Cariqa, about why the business model underneath public charging is the thing holding the market back. Issam's argument: as long as e-mobility providers buy energy from charge point operators and resell it, the operator becomes a passenger in its own business, priced by someone else and exposed to 80 to 90% of its demand coming from someone else. The conversation gets concrete about what that costs everyone. The same charger, at the same location, can carry 50 different prices depending on which card you hold, which Issam compares to a supermarket with no price tags where the till asks how you intend to pay. On the operator side the economics are unforgiving: average utilisation runs at 8 to 10% while break even sits around 20 to 23%, roughly 10% of stations do the real work, and more than half of an operator's cost has nothing to do with electricity. Cariqa's answer is a platform where the operator stays the merchant of record, plus a Connect API Issam likens to what Stripe did for online payments, free to integrate and built so a working charging app can be assembled in an afternoon. They also get into where this collides with the grid. Issam wants grid fees that are congestion based rather than punishing a single annual peak, is sceptical that Europe needs five million charge points to serve two congested days a year, and would rather the market found its own pricing discipline than have AFIR force it. On smart charging and V2G he is deliberately careful: the hard part is not the technology but getting operators, CPMS providers, e-mobility providers and carmakers to cooperate without the grid operator buying the same flexibility twice, and he sees home and office charging as the better fit for V2G because parking a car all day on a public charger fights the utilisation the industry needs. An episode about the plumbing under EV charging, and about what it takes for a market to fix its own incentives before someone else does it for it. Topics covered: - Why the reseller model makes charge point operators passengers - Price chaos and the case for one price per station - Utilisation economics and why charge point operators are not simply greedy - AI driven per station pricing, and a free weekend on negative power prices - Grid fees, congestion and the case against building for peak days - Where V2G actually fits, and where it does not