From fuel stations to destination hubs: Klaas Mantel on the EV charging opportunity

“New mobility retail will be good for most [fuel retailers] . . . but the skill set for success will change and if you are going to play the EV game you need to get serious and invest for the future.” A leading McKinsey advisor challenges fuel retailers to shift from a ‘glass half empty’ to ‘glass half full’ mindset when crafting their electric vehicle (EV) strategy. 

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I recently had the pleasure of attending a keynote presentation by Klaas Mantel from McKinsey during the ReFuel Forum APAC event in Bangkok. Klaas spoke about the future of mobility retail, and how to successfully play in the charging infrastructure business. 

It was a thought-provoking talk during an excellent event which boasted many stellar speakers and attendees. So what made Klaas’ views stand out? Here are the three things that most resonated with delegates and what they could mean for your fuel retail business: 

1

Does your fuel retail business have a ‘glass half empty’ or ‘glass half full’ mindset? 

Klaas suggested that many fuel retailers take a ‘glass half empty’ view of the emerging opportunity in EV charging. It’s not surprising. 

Only 15% of EV charging is currently done ‘on the go’, and EV penetration is driving down footfall at retail stations. It’s an immense undertaking to transform the standard business model, and there’s formidable competition from new operators, including home delivery platforms like Uber Eats and Doordash who are redefining our perception of convenience. 

However, Klaas firmly takes a ‘glass half full’ view, emphasising the opportunity to drive growth with expanded grocery offers combined with the potential value of EV charging. 

He shared that today only 2% of grocery sales are via forecourts – giving our industry a massive opportunity to capture share from other retail channels, such as traditional (62%), modern (31%) and convenience (5%) grocery retail. 

While traditional fuel sales are declining, this will be offset by gains in EVs and non-fuel retail (eg convenience, car wash, hospo, etc.). McKinsey predicts that the non-fuel retail value pool will grow 3% pa to US$40 billion, up from US$24 billion in 2019. The EV charging pool is estimated to rise from negligible to US$15 billion by 2030.  

And forecourts are uniquely positioned to develop new business models to become home delivery hubs. 

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2

There are three key areas for ensuring success  

Klaas explained that ‘new mobility retailers’ with both recharge and non-fuel destination offerings will have the best chance of future success.   

The successful new mobility retailers will be characterised by three things: 

• Multiple non-fuel retail destination offers synergistic with EV to provide an exceptional customer experience during longer stays 

• Superior cash generation per location enabled by a real estate management mindset  

• No longer reliant on liquid fuel income ensures resilience to future decline of the fuel value pool. 

That means developing a compelling CX and investing in the right locations with the right offering, with Klaas adding: “That may mean acknowledging that EV won’t work on some sites, it will mean investing in convenience retail, charger access and building a customer experience that is safe, welcoming and appropriate.” 

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3

How will you successfully play in the charging infrastructure business? 

Klaas acknowledged that this new world of mobility retail is not for everyone. Convenience players are actively acquiring fuel retail assets, and the integrated majors have concentrated their footprints while focusing on organic growth in priority markets.  

And unlike ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicles, EVs have multiple options to ‘refuel’ and won’t be primarily recharging at public stations. 

However, forecourt retailers are well positioned to win Klaas says, and here’s why: 

• Knowledge of the mobility customer across B2C, B2B and B2B2C 

• Already know and run a network business 

• Able to drive energy transition, including hybrid offers (fuel, bio, EV, H2) 

• Benefit from EV charging being an incremental business (and thus incremental investment) to existing network 

• Access to capital.

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Klaas closed by urging delegates to take the glass half full approach and act now to capture a fair share of ‘electron sales’ and remain competitive.  

Here are three questions he encouraged fuel retailers to consider as you evolve your business model to meet changing usage patterns: 

• Can you capture share of grocery sales from other retail channels? 

• What is the value pool outlook in your region, and what share can you capture? 

• Can you develop new business models? 

Is EV charging a priority for your retail business? Or do you have other priorities? I’d love to hear. Please send your thoughts to kelly.brown@triquestra.com. 

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Want help to build your EV charging experience? 

If you’re looking for help to develop a differentiating experience for your EV charging customers, get in touch. We’d love to help you create a winning offering that will leapfrog your business and create new value.  

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For more on how to deliver every c-store customer a personalised, fast and seamless experience, download our new ebook:  

API Days: opening the door to new strategies

Attending the API Days NZ Conference recently gave me the opportunity to learn the API journey of several successful companies, and how they came to be where they are today.

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Ian Randall, a software engineer at Pushpay, presented ‘APIs at Pushpay – A Continuous Delivery Story.

Ian described the PushPay API store from the beginning to its current position. Starting from one API, they eventually split into two: public and mobile. The mobile API is for internal company use only, with the amount of data used always kept at a minimal level – the only data transferred is what a client needs.

Ian also spoke about Pushpay’s delivery approach. Changes are pushed to production at least six times per day. The development team and the test team are fully integrated, allowing for the efficient resolution of any issues raised during testing.

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Barak Chamo, a London-based developer, introduced us to GraphOL, a new technology which is leading to a new language.

Originally developed by Facebook for its mobile applications, GraphOL became open source in 2015. It brought a paradigm shift in the way we approach data transfer, from the front to back-end of applications.

Instead of using predefined data and response structures, a developer can declare a graph form of a data model, and request data in its object form in a JSON-like syntax. GraphOL also makes things easier, without the need to maintain v1, v3, and v100 or APIs to ensure legacy versions are supported. GraphOL queries always return predictable results. Send a GraphOL query to your API and you get exactly what you need – nothing more and nothing less. If more than one object is required, GraphOL queries follow the references between the resources, retrieving multiple objects in a single request. This means applications which are GraphOL-based are fast, even on slow mobile network connections.

The only disadvantage is GraphOL is a brand new language API developers need to learn – or is that actually another advantage?

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Abhishek Tiwari is a lead software engineer at Isentia, and spoke about legacy code API transformation journey.

Due to one-time, one-place processing and isolation of business rules, stored procedure has been used as a de facto standard for application to access and manipulate data. But if you have a legacy code with most of the business logic imbedded into it, you can still develop API against the stored procedures considering them as a variation of Functions as a service (FaaS).

A function in FaaS is a self-contained piece of reusable functionality, which makes them similar to stored procedures. This means stored procedures can be converted one by one into FaaS functions to be executed via API endpoints.

API days presented a wide and informative range of new technologies, together with approaches to using these new technologies. We were able to see ways to enhance the API build process and get new features into production quickly and safely.  There were ideas on how businesses use APIs by mixing new and old technology to enable them expand the capabilities of legacy systems through APIs, without the need to reengineer or rearchitect much of what is already in place.

While API itself is not new, it has recently turned into a key tool. It could be compared with a door. For a developer, it is a door into the software program - APIs allow interactions without need to share the code. For a business, it is a door to the leading products market, which turns competitors into partners.

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It’s time to open the door.

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