How NEAS Took EV Charging In-House and Made It a Revenue Stream

NEAS has been the local supplier for Norway's Nordmøre region since 1920, selling electricity, broadband, TV, mobile and electrical services to households and businesses from its base in Kristiansund. Everything runs through one app and one invoice, on a promise to stay close to the customers and put the neighborhood first.

EV charging was the exception. So NEAS decided to move its 600 charge points off a third-party platform and onto its own invoice, app and CRM. Here's what it took, and what changed.

The Cost of Letting Someone Else Own Charging

NEAS had run charging on an external platform for around five years. While the solution worked, one important ingredient was missing: a direct relationship with the customer. The charging invoice came from another provider, and between plugging in and paying, NEAS had little opportunity to improve the overall customer experience or create a connected journey across the wider ecosystem of services that NEAS provides.

A driver charging at home was a NEAS customer having a NEAS experience delivered by somebody else.

NEAS wanted to be the company that bills the customer for charging, and the one the customer talks to. That would also let it package charging with other services, the same way it already sells electricity and broadband together.

Competition added urgency. New operators and regulations are shaping the energy market. A local supplier keeps its customers close by offering more of what they need.

"We wanted to take the customer closer to us. It's vital for us to offer more services and be a total vendor." - Alf Haltbakk Solbjør, Head of Digitalization at NEAS

What Changes When Charging Comes In-House

Charging now appears on the same invoice as the electricity and broadband, and NEAS can bundle it with a power agreement and discount the package, which it couldn't do before.

It also changed how often NEAS hears from its customers. Electricity is a monthly invoice. Charging happens several times a week, and each of those moments creates a touchpoint. Those turn into conversations about broadband, mobile, and the rest of the range. They're sales conversations that weren't happening before.

Every service running through the same app and the same invoice makes NEAS harder for a national operator to match.

"We're close to customers, so we can service them physically and digitally. That's something that is hard to copy." - Oscar Markovic, Marketing Consultant at NEAS

Choosing an EV Charging Platform That Fits Existing Systems

NEAS began looking for a platform that would integrate into the systems it already ran. The platform had to:

• Move charging data into their CRM, billing system and app through open REST and push APIs

• Connect to the wider ecosystem, including roaming

• Work at scale, so costs wouldn't climb with every charger added

NEAS reviewed five platforms and chose eMabler, which met all three requirements. Charging now connects to every system NEAS already runs:

• Utility Cloud, their billing platform, so a charging session becomes a line on the electricity invoice

• Mitt Neas, their customer app, already used by half of NEAS's customers

• Salesforce, their CRM, so customer-facing teams see the whole relationship: which products a customer holds, how often they've been in contact, and what they're likely to need next. Charging questions are answered from the CRM rather than by opening an external system, with eMabler Connect there for the detail Salesforce doesn't carry.

eMabler manages the chargers underneath: the connection to each charge point, the sessions, the tariffs, and the data feeding all three.

In the app, the customers do the work themselves. They set up a charging agreement, reach public chargers and private ones at their own building, and configure their own RFID tags. Business customers administer tags from the same portal, and control which vehicle has access to what.

Internally, the same data reaches operations, billing, sales and product: chargers and faults, invoice lines and corrections, tariffs, agreements and revenue sharing.

"We were one of the first customers of Utility Cloud back in 2021, so we trusted them when they said they'd make the connection work with eMabler. It's built now. The next energy retailer on Utility Cloud can just connect to it." - Alf Haltbakk Solbjør, Head of Digitalization at NEAS

Migrating 600 Charge Points

Roughly 600 charge points had to come off the old platform, each placed in the correct tariff, across about sixty sites, every site representing a signed contract. It was the largest piece of the project, and it went well.

The work was in making several systems behave as one customer journey. The same agreement, driver, and charging transaction had to move correctly between the CRM, the billing system, the app and eMabler. NEAS tuned the app and the APIs as it went. The migration took a couple of months, ending with NEAS sending charging invoices for the first time.

One effect the company had prepared for hasn't arrived. Taking over billing for a service usually drives support calls up. So far it hasn't.

NEAS spent a lot of the early effort on edge cases, but found most were already handled by eMabler.

"A lot of the edge cases we worried about, we found out eMabler had already solved, for example tariff groups." - Fredrik Skogrand, Head of Sales and Marketing at NEAS

What NEAS would do differently is mostly about internal preparation. You can never test enough, and the scenarios deserve a structured testing list from the start: residential and business customers, housing associations, public charging, RFID and app charging, ad hoc payments, revenue sharing, and refunds. Working through that list puts every routine the business runs on in front of you at once, which is why a migration is a rare opportunity to restructure workflows rather than carry them across unchanged.

Where NEAS Is Now

569 charge points are live across about sixty sites, each one a signed contract. 53 new customers have signed charging agreements, most of them new to NEAS rather than migrated.

"The new charging platform opens new sales opportunities, both within our existing customer base and in new market segments. We can now develop solutions for a wider range of use cases, particularly where electricity cost reimbursement and charging revenue management are essential." - Fredrik Skogrand, Head of Sales and Marketing at NEAS

Fredrik continues, "This allows us to offer customers a more seamless and automated way to manage both charging expenses and revenues, while strengthening our position as a full-service provider of energy and charging solutions."

What comes next is commercial charging, company cars, taxis, and home charging. Smart charging is where the electricity business and the charging business meet, timing charging to when power is cheapest.

Advice for Energy Retailers Considering the Same Move

NEAS's main advice is to settle the requirements before the platform decision:

1. Don't assume charging is too complicated to run yourselves. Plugging it into the systems you already have is a smaller job than it looks from the outside.

2. Decide who should own the customer, the data, the invoice and the experience.

3. Don't underestimate the operational side: failed sessions, tariffs, access, reimbursements, customer support and revenue sharing. Each one needs a clear owner.

"Own the parts that differentiate your business: customer relationship, brand, data and commercial model. Use a specialized platform for the charging technology but make sure it's open enough to become part of your existing architecture. That's what eMabler has been to us." - Alf Haltbakk Solbjør, Head of Digitalization at NEAS

Already running Salesforce, Utility Cloud, or your own customer app?

Utility Cloud, NEAS and eMabler built that connection together, so the next retailer on it starts from a connection that works. If you're weighing whether to bring charging in-house, we can walk you through what it would take with the systems you already have.