A CPMS is one of the longest-lived decisions a charging network operator makes. It issues the invoices, takes the payments, reports to regulators and connects to the ERP, the CRM and every partner system around it. The feature list that won the selection describes the platform on the day of signing. Three to five years later, the business it has to support looks very different.
Stefan Ivanov, CRO and co-founder of AMPECO, put the stakes this way at the AMPECO masterclass at ICNC26 in Berlin in September 2026: “The platform you choose today is either your anchor or your launchpad for success.”
The gap between that initial feature list and what the business needs over time keeps widening. Every year brings new regulation, new payment channels, new use cases and sharper efficiency targets, and operators with more sites in more markets feel it first. These demands land on every CPMS’s roadmap. So judge a charging platform by the direction it’s moving. Every platform draws a line between what ships out of the box and what an operator has to build or buy around it. A platform can push that line in two directions, breadth and depth, and which way it moved last year says more about the next five than any feature list.
Where the line sat in 2025
When selecting a CPMS, most network operators consider two main approaches. An All-in-One platform covers everything in one system. It’s simple to run, but the operator is limited to what the platform offers and lets them configure. A Modular stack puts several systems together, one for the charge point operations, another for the eMSP side, a third for energy management, alongside the ERP and CRM; it can be shaped to almost any requirement, but every connection between the pieces has to be built and maintained. Both work well up to a point. As operators grow, All-in-One becomes too limiting and Modular too costly and complex.
AMPECO built the Integrated Platform to give operators the simplicity of All-in-One with the flexibility of Modular. That was the platform-over-product argument it made through 2025. That meant deep feature coverage out of the box, open and documented APIs, connections to the specialist systems an operator already runs, one place for customer data, and the freedom to adapt business flows and user interfaces.
That freedom is where the operator puts its own effort. Instead of redeveloping a whole flow, the operator changes only the part that matters to it, such as an authorization step checked against its own CRM. White-label mobile app customization lets the operator add its own functionality to the app, and custom widgets put the views its team needs on the operator dashboard and resource pages. Specialist partners connect through the AMPECO Marketplace. Throughout, the operator keeps full ownership of its brand, its data and its business model.
What the market asks for in 2026
Over the past year, several main requests have come up in AMPECO’s conversations across the market, with prospects, investors, consultants and industry experts.
Operators running in-house platforms are under investor pressure to cut development cost as far as possible, and at the same time they need to keep the competitive advantages those platforms were built to create. Operators on All-in-One providers want more control as competition sharpens, but they need a platform automated enough to bring operations in-house and run them profitably. And across the market, running the network efficiently has become the top priority, which asks more of the tools operations teams use every day.
Behind those requests sit new rules and use cases: AFIR and national reporting rules, fiscalization, Plug & Charge, dynamic pricing, flexibility and demand response, predictive maintenance, fraud and cybersecurity.
Taken together, these point to one demand: achieve more with less. Operators want driver journeys that set them apart and leaner operations, and they want to get there with fewer development hours and custom builds. They can meet it in one of two ways. They can rely on a platform vendor that keeps pace with the market, or they can make up for what the vendor doesn’t cover by building it themselves. And when two competitors run on a platform that keeps pace, the place left to compete is differentiation, so the question becomes how much effort the platform asks of an operator to stand out.
The next frontier: breadth and depth
Ten years ago, a CPMS managed charge points. It implemented OCPP, started and stopped sessions, and passed the charging data on. Operators now expect it to run far more of their business. AMPECO’s strategy from 2026 onward starts from that demand, and it is to extend what operators get out of the box in breadth and depth at the same time.
Breadth: bringing the areas around the charger into the platform
Breadth means covering the areas that used to sit outside the CPMS and that operators move into as their business matures: payment terminals at the charger and reconciliation with the payment provider, energy management and grid-aware charging, B2B invoicing, home charging reimbursement, telematics and parking sensors. Each one starts as an edge case and ends up as part of running the network.
Today an operator covers each of these areas in one of two ways. It connects a separate third-party system for each one and manages every connection, or it builds the capability in-house, if its team has the capacity at all.
Payment terminals show what breadth means in practice. A card terminal on a charger now decides whether a session happens at all: the charger can be online, and if the card terminal fails, nobody charges. So the terminal needs the same care as the charger. AMPECO connects terminals embedded in the charger, cloud to cloud or through OCPI direct payments, and on terminals running AMPECO’s own terminal app it treats each one as a managed asset: operators see its status, device details and software versions and roll out updates in bulk. On those terminals, the driver sees the full tariff before starting and picks a connector on screen. For an operator taking operations in-house, terminals become part of the same daily routine as chargers, in the same portal.
AMPECO plans breadth around where operators are heading, so a new area arrives inside the platform instead of as another system to run alongside it.
Depth: going to the bottom of every process
Depth means a process runs from start to finish inside one platform, so the operator doesn’t stitch together other systems, patches and plugins, or build the missing steps itself. Every platform on the market implements OCPP and passes on rated charging sessions; depth is how far each one carries the process after that.
Depth is also the hard part of building a CPMS. Each new area brings its own exceptions, and once operators use it day to day, they find every case that isn’t yet tailored to how they work. “With breadth comes the requirement for depth,” as Stefan put it. Norbert Teichmann, IT Director at Allego, said of the platform Allego chose to move its European network onto: “The platform did not just look good on paper, it demonstrated depth across the core CPMS capabilities needed to operate and scale a large charging network.”
Take B2B partner invoicing. Many platforms stop at the rated charging session. From there, operators either outsource invoicing, with limited visibility, limited control and transaction fees, or they do it themselves, which takes people and complex integrations. AMPECO takes the process further inside the platform. Partner invoices are issued straight from settlement reports, one at a time or in batches, with revenue-share and platform-fee lines and tax taken from the settlement records. Self-billing invoices cover the cases where the operator owes the partner, credit notes reverse an invoice, invoices can go straight to the partner’s billing contact, and partners download their own invoices from their own view. The operator stays in control throughout, and the parts it prefers to keep in its own systems stay there, through the Public API.
Depth is where AMPECO has put most of its product work over the years.
How AMPECO moves on both at once
Extending breadth and depth at the same time, at the complexity large operators run at, is a lot to build, document and support, and every new feature has to earn its place by contributing to the operator’s bottom line. AMPECO rebuilt its engineering around AI during 2025, and the AI-native engineering system behind it is what lets it extend the platform in both dimensions and ship every week. For an operator weighing up a platform, how the vendor builds its software belongs on the scorecard next to what it has already built.
A feature checklist can’t tell you how a CPMS will look in five years
Whether a platform turns into an anchor or a launchpad depends on where it goes after you sign. Its release history shows how quickly operator needs become shipped capability, and breadth and depth show how far that capability reaches. Before you commit, put these questions to any CPMS partner:
- How do you decide what to build next, and whose requirements shape that decision?
- Which areas outside the core CPMS did you bring into the platform over the last year?
- When you cover an area, does the process run end to end inside the platform, or stop at a data export?
- When a regulation changes in one of our markets, how does that reach the platform, and how quickly?
- Where we want to do things our own way, what tools and freedom do we keep?
For a broader checklist, see 10 questions every CPO should ask their CPMS provider before signing.
AMPECO has worked on one principle since its first day: it doesn’t compete with the operators it serves. Every area it brings into the platform, and every process it takes deeper, is work an operator no longer has to build, so the operator’s team can spend that time on what sets its business apart.
Bring us the hardest use case on your list. We’ll work through it with you, in a demo or a proof of concept built around your scenario.
