EV Magazine April 2023 | Page 16

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW :

SARA SLOMAN

At EV Magazine LIVE , Sara Sloman took to the stage to debunk some of the questions around mobility and how digital payments factor into transport evolution

Thanks to the team at BizClik and a great cast of speakers at EV Magazine LIVE , we were able to host a positive , future-driven show with a lot of buy-in from the in-person attendees as well as the global virtual audience .

After the panel discussion ‘ Mobility : Electrification begins with EV infrastructure ’, we caught up with Sara Sloman , Chief Strategy Officer at Paythru to find out more about a relatively underrepresented field of business and customer experience in the EV sector .
While the focus on payments is evolving as cars become more capable of interacting with chargers through connected car services , the next step seems to be to simplify the experience . This means making EVs do the work and leave drivers to focus on the more important things .
PAYMENT IS CRITICAL IN THE DAILY USE OF AN EV . WHY ?
The payment experience is such a critical part of the charging experience because if you can ' t get the payment to happen , then the charger will not function . Those signals won ' t be sent back and forth in the right way , so the poor consumer won ' t be able to access that charger . Really , the secret to it is about making sure it ' s flexible .
So , this means choosing a partner who can deliver you a multi-platform payment solution . I myself as an EV driver have been screaming at charge points before just to take my money . I don ' t need anything fancy ; I just need you to give me the electricity so I can be on my way .
That means leveraging RFID , where you swipe on the physical card . It can be something like a QR code that connects you to the Internet or , from the majority of
16 [ April 2023 ] EVMAGAZINE . COM