CTO @ Digital Charging Solutions

Digital Charging Solutions 2023 Q1, Robert Schwegler, CTO

My review of 6 months at DCS

Starting in a new vertical market is exhilarating, especially if it is an area where you contribute to make the world a little better. Clean air and less noise in the cities by providing easy access to charging infrastructure for electric cars seems an excellent contribution to me. That is why I joined DCS in the first place and that is why I want to share some insights on my first few months of working at DCS.

Looking back at this time, I had the opportunity to make contact with quite a variety of tasks and business segments that excite me day in and day out. Over the next few months, I’m planning to take you on a journey through these segments, explaining what we at DCS are working on and how anyone interested can contribute to it.

As an optimist, I think that if everybody works towards a kind of betterment, we as a global community can make huge strides! Participating in my daily work to such a goal energizes me and the team at DCS – and so it might motivate you, too.

DCS – a rising EMSP star

DCS was a startup in the field of EMSP (E-Mobility Service Provider) and is now a scaleup supplying its service in a B2B2C model to many big auto brands. Being successful with 1 million charging events back in 2019 aiming now for the same number per month. Having more than 500,000 charge points available at a click in the mobile app with the corresponding status of availability is amazing.

DCS has multiple business models: a B2B model providing white label service to auto manufacturers to promote their electric vehicles, a second B2B model for fleet managers, and a B2C model for private drivers with the CHARGE NOW app.

E-mobility services powered by FinTech and IoT

From a technical standpoint we are building and optimizing services to keep the electro mobility going in two big topic areas: FinTech and IoT. FinTech knowledge is needed to help run the complex fulfilment processes in the B2B environment to accelerate the cashflow between parties with the goal of making the payment fast, precise, and a commodity for all participating partners and the driver. In this area we use off-the-shelf products for billing, CRM and campaign management. The IoT part deals with the mass data being provided from the charge point providers with the complexity to deal with a varying data quality.

We are building white label native apps for iOS and Android, but also a B2C app CHARGE NOW. We are hosted on Microsoft Azure. We use mainly Java/Springboot but encourage the use of Kotlin as an alternative. APIs drive our business; thus, we use extensively Microsoft APIM. Our applications are running on K8S.

It’s not just about tech, it’s about creating a company

We are now transitioning from a new economy company conquering markets to a scale-up organization maturing its processes with a lot of automation focus. Aligning our organization to our future target architecture was the first step to setting a clear vision for the future. Fostering the culture of continuous integration and delivery to promote a high-frequency deployment process with test automation will be the bedrock to scale our transaction growth.

We are in the sweet spot for software engineers to work at scale and being able to influence the architecture, design, and automation in a Value Team organization!

Stay tuned – or better: get on board

As you can see – there is quite a lot to talk about when it comes to the DCS universe. In the future, I will deep dive into some of those topics and invite a few of our experts to join me in this conversation. My goal is to share insights about the work I love to do, the journey of an agile and future-oriented company in a vividly changing industry, and of course convey some of the excitement we have here at DCS.

Wanna learn more about DCS:

https://digitalchargingsolutions.com/web/dcs-global ?

You are interested to join us:

https://digitalchargingsolutions.career.softgarden.de/en/

?