The Mobility Review - What's New? In Conversation with Niall Riddell, CEO & Co-Founder of Paua

Interviewed and written by Alfie Blanchard, Consultant at Brightsmith

Welcome to another article in our Mobility Review series. this time, Alfie sits down with Niall Riddell, the CEO and Co-Founder of Paua , an electric fleet optimisation platform. Alfie and Niall chatted all things EV, read on to find out more!

Hi Niall, thanks for giving me your time today. To those who may not know you, tell us a bit about yourself & Paua

Hi Alfie, happy to be here!

I suppose to summarise: I’m an engineer by training, and I initially planned on getting into the oil & gas industry, then thought I’d get into water management, and somehow ended up in the Nuclear industry! This set me on a trajectory of 15 years in large energy utilities, and then onto starting my own business.

A very forward-thinking boss put me on the committee on climate change back in 2007, and I had the privilege of writing the UK’s first legally binding carbon budgets. This helped me understand that climate change was real and that there are technology solutions out there to help mitigate and manage some of it.

When I was at EDF, I spent a bunch of time writing forecasts for the future of the energy markets. So my job was to look 25 years into the future, and lo and behold did we screw that up because we missed the solar boom! But ultimately, this left me obsessed with the grid edge tech, the energy transition, and the digitization of energy etc… until one day someone turned around and said, ‘Hey Niall, come work with the EV team’, and that’s how I got into this space.

A few years down the line and after a bit of time with SSE, I left to build Paua. And we’re building a platform that enables businesses to simplify the transition to electric fleets. We started that with public charging, and we’re on the journey to include other features and capabilities that mean businesses have the toolset to transition to the world of EVs as simply as possible.

You’ve had immense success as a company so far, and have some great partners such as Connected Kerb, Fastned, and Osprey. How has the journey been so far?

Slightly wild! As with many companies, the date when we officially started and when we unofficially started is different. I remember having some of the first conversations with charge point operators some years before we really got Paua moving.

We’ve now aggregated 25 charge point networks, having agreements with a?few more than that, we also have 25,000 live charge point connectors.

Effectively, we now have more sites in the country that have a power-enabled EV charge point in them than there are petrol stations – which is a pretty cool thing to be able to say.

And just to mention, the reason I use the word ‘connectors’, is because it’s the common denominator in terms of vocabulary when talking about charge points, everyone can count them, everyone can agree on it, and I believe we need to standardise our language as much as possible as an industry.

With the number of solutions out there at the moment, do you think that education and standardising vocabulary is a good way of helping solidify a wide industry and helping that transition further?

Yes, but I’ve got a slight allergy to the word education, and perhaps it’s because it has the connotations of being sat down in school being force-fed something you don’t want to learn. My instinct is that it’s about information, guidance, knowledge, and not education. People are very good at educating themselves. Think 8 or so years ago and everyone was like ‘Netflix?! How does that work?’. Well it didn’t take people long to figure that one out.

I don’t think there’s an issue with education, I think there’s an issue with having the information available. What’s fabulous to see is the number of decent-sized corporates going out there and publishing whole sets of insights and information on electric vehicles right from the start.

The information is there, now we need to slowly nudge people into the space of ‘pub conversations’. I think we’ll be there when you can be talking in the pub and someone goes, ‘I’m thinking of getting a new car and getting an EV’, and the person next to him goes, ‘Yeye do it! I’ve got an EV!’, and BOOM that’s the dream.

There’s this assumption given the amount of news and media that we are further ahead on the technology adoption curve than we actually are. Realistically we are at the very beginning with less than 2% of all vehicles on the road being battery-electric, and we aren’t anywhere near the mainstream yet. But what’s really interesting to see is how much people love their cars, and how they talk about EVs as a consequence. This will change, with time.

What are some of the key innovations/technologies that have caused Paua to truly stand out from the crowd?

That’s a cool question because we have some great funky things we can do. Basically, we have treated this transition like an IOT-based experiment. Nearly every single charge point we are building is internet-connected, and they all have some form of 3G comms capability, and what we do is connect directly to the software that runs the charge point for our 25 different partners. The fascinating thing is that this varies hugely between network partners as in some cases it’s slick, but sometimes it can take weeks to get things flush.

What we have is a ground-up solution we built in-house that enables drivers to go through 3 crucial steps; 1. Find, 2. Charge, 3. Pay.?

1. The 1st step is all about getting on the highway and knowing where the chargers are; so mobile app, pin location, and drive. And crucially real-time data on availability.
2. This step is always getting there and thinking, ‘Right how do I turn this thing on?’. We went into this thinking that an app would solve everything, however, the vast majority of our transactions go through our card, and our app only sits in the background and gathers data. With our solution, when you tap your Paua card, the app starts running as the card acts as a digital token, so you can go and have a coffee, check the app, and see how much charge you’ve got etc… We have built an integrated system that helps the customer get that experience – there’s a long way to go to make this really slick, but we’re trying to drive that ecosystem forward.
3. The 3rd step is then to pay, and at Paua we focus very much on businesses. And businesses have a very big pain point in the space - the aggregation of bills. No longer do drivers need to pay for themselves and hunt down tax receipts. Everything can be offered in one place.

So, we’re in the space of offering a business solution, by giving the driver the tools for a super simple experience, and the fleet manager the ability to see what’s going on. This means the driver can tap their card, the charge session starts, we gather the data, and the fleet manager can track the session, pay the bills, keep the accounts team happy with tax invoices, and we create a super simple slick experience.

What’s really fun, is that we can offer layers on top of this. So now we can see each charging session happen. For example, if things are going wrong; like people charging the wrong vehicle, or if a charging session drops out mid-way through, or if the bill is too big as someone has stayed on a charge point too long and incurred fees. We can break down these problems and inform the fleet managers in order to identify opportunities and create real value for these fleets.

Are there any exciting plans for Paua in 2023 and beyond that we can look out for?

This is going to sound weird. But the most exciting thing for me at the moment, is that we are fundraising, and I really love this process. I think that VCs are some of the brightest people you will meet, their job is high stakes, and they have a lot of pressure to invest and make a high return. And, they ask really, really awkward questions.

So we’re going through a journey at the moment to tell the story of our business. Telling the story of what we do, what we can do, and telling investors our vision as a fleet operations business which is setting us some really challenging questions. And it’s exciting answering them and showing where the future of this business will go, and how we can give businesses the option to adopt electric vehicles. Clearly, the positive outcome of these conversations is some capital to raise and grow faster. We’re in an interesting position because we have a small and tight team we could double in size and probably double our impact.

It will be exciting to scale and deliver more integration with both UK & international operators, to enable us to drive the solutions we’re building and really set the UK at the forefront of the EV transition.

You have been in this EV space for some time now, and have a great knowledge of the industry. From your experience and perspective, what would you say the ideal charging ecosystem looks like?

The answer to this question is simple. The ideal charging system is one that we don’t talk about.

As soon as we get to the point when we don’t have to have this conversation we will have it cracked. Once it is really boring and no one is talking about EV charging because it’s a bit like going to the petrol station, we will more or less be there.

When we have reached the point of combining high-power rapid charging, overnight charging, on-street charging, driveway charging, at-work charging, and more, into a seamless and automated experience which is acceptable, understandable, accessible, and reasonably priced, we’re going to be a long way down the road.

I couldn’t agree more. Obviously, the EV & charging world is scaling massively which is incredibly positive, however, there are still challenges & obstacles to overcome. What would you say the biggest challenges are in your opinion?

The biggest single obstacle I come across regularly, which I think hampers the industry in a number of areas, are armchair experts. There is a huge per cent of people that don’t drive an EV, and haven’t lived through this journey, and quite a few of them are in roles that are building products, and delivering functionality, without having had the experience.

When people come to me asking what it is like to drive an EV or those who want to work in this sector, I always tell them to go and hire a car for a weekend or week and go and get a bunch of experiences.?You will have more experience in a couple of weeks than you would from doing any training course.

You’ll go for a long drive, and probably not get it right the first time. But once you understand this charging experience and the behavioural changes you need to consider on that journey, you will be so much better informed. My main fear is that there are people in decision-making positions that haven’t had this experience. The more we can do to get the armchair experts into electric cars, the more we can do to make the EV adoption happen.

Would you say as an industry, we are doing enough to encourage people of all backgrounds to pursue a career in mobility?

Right, so this is a question that makes me guilty every time I have this conversation because I’m a white male from an educated background and I haven’t faced as many challenges as people may have had entering this space. What would I know? Are we doing enough? I’m unsure. Am I doing enough? Possibly not. Can I do more? Probably. What is that 'more'? I don’t know, but I hope someone will reach out and help me understand how to be better.

Thanks for chatting with me today Niall, any closing remarks on your side? Maybe an inspirational quote?

I do love an inspirational quote!

The future is Pauaful?

Ha! No, that’s a pun and we have lots of those, GirlPaua, Paua to the people, have you got the Paua? The list is endless! But inspirational quotes - I think I have a relevant one.

To quote Sheryl Sandberg: ‘If someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, don’t ask which one, just get on.’

When it comes to the EV industry, this is a rocket ship, it is moving fast, and it’s still very tight-knit, but if someone offers you a seat, get on and get involved.

Thanks Niall!

If you want to learn more - follow? Alfie Blanchard ?and? Niall Riddell M.A.F.P ?on LinkedIn.