We are proud to announce that Velian, one of the Netherlands’ most established EV charging network operators operating over 33.000 charge points across The Netherlands, has selected AMPECO to run a core and growing share of its charging network. Alongside the platform move, Velian is taking roaming, SIM connectivity, and B2B invoicing in-house.
Before selecting their new Charge Point Management System (CPMS), the Velian team assessed every major vendor and weighed building parts of the stack itself on open-source technology. Four requirements decided it: control over its own infrastructure, an API-first architecture, strong security, and a dedicated environment rather than a shared one.
What an AC-led network asks of its software
Most of the attention in EV charging goes to speed. Velian’s network is built on the opposite premise: that AC is where most drivers actually charge, and will stay the backbone of everyday charging for businesses, real estate, fleets, and governments rather than a stepping stone to fast DC.
That only holds if the economics work over a long horizon, which is what Velian’s DBFMO model is for. Velian designs, builds, finances, maintains, and operates the infrastructure itself: site partners commit no upfront capital and carry no investor risk, and Velian owns the assets for the length of the contract. The software has to stay operational just as long.
That shows up first in the grid. The Dutch electricity network is under real strain, so adding AC capacity at scale means working inside those limits, site by site. Velian sets that strategy; what it needs from the platform is room to execute it, with freedom to pick hardware suited to a constrained site and an API to connect its own energy tooling.
Circularity has a similar shape. Velian’s refurbishment and return programmes extend the working life of its charge points, a cost decision before an environmental one. That means a network is never built on a single generation of a single manufacturer’s hardware, where a returning refurbished unit is a configuration task, not a project.
Then there is the number concession authorities and drivers both measure. Velian holds itself to above 99% uptime nationwide, built over more than 14 years of operating public and private charging. At that scale reliability is a data problem, and the platform’s job is to surface the detail Velian’s team acts on.
That is why the evaluation of its next CPMS included more than a feature list.
Why Velian chose AMPECO as its software backbone
Operators evaluating charging software face a question that has nothing to do with features: does this vendor also compete with me? A provider that runs its own network, sells hardware, has their own eMSP app on the App Store, or operates as an e-mobility service provider is a supplier and a competitor at once.
For Velian, competing for municipal concessions against companies that also sell software, that had to be settled first. AMPECO works only with charging network operators and takes no share of driver-facing transactions, so nothing it sells competes with what Velian is building and nothing sits between Velian and its drivers.
The same principle governs what Velian builds. Anything Velian develops on the platform belongs to Velian. That includes the IP for any capabilities built on top of it, all delivered under a white-label platform where drivers, site hosts, and partners only ever see Velian’s brand.
Velian also runs on a dedicated single-tenant instance, with its own security configuration and its own deployment windows for testing releases before they reach its environment. For a network carrying municipal concessions in the country’s largest cities, that isolation is the difference between an incident somewhere else staying someone else’s problem and becoming Velian’s.
Roaming on Velian’s terms
Roaming is where operators most often lose that freedom. AMPECO supports all three approaches, self-managed, managed, and hybrid, so roaming stays a commercial decision for the operator rather than one that the software makes.
Velian is moving off managed roaming and will run its agreements directly, with oversight from its own roaming manager. AMPECO’s roaming tooling carries the operational weight that creates, including the session and Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) logs that a team needs to run agreements itself, and AMPECO’s integration team worked alongside Velian through the migration.
The upside is commercial: Velian sets its own terms, chooses which operators it connects to, gets 100% of the revenue, and renegotiates on its own behalf. In Europe’s densest charging market, those terms are worth owning.
Pricing a driver can check before plugging in
Velian has committed publicly to clear, predictable prices, arguing drivers should know the cost of a session before they start it. That only holds if the platform can deliver it.
On AMPECO, Velian configures its own tariffs. AMPECO adds no transaction fees or markups of its own, so the price a driver sees is the price Velian sets, and billing runs on the same basis.
Hardware and integrations Velian picks for itself
AMPECO supports more than 200 hardware manufacturers and 400+ charge point models, and its Hardware Integrations team tests compatibility before go-live rather than after. Velian picks the charge points, payment processors, and roaming partners it wants, not the ones the platform allows, which also decides which tenders it can bid for.
The AMPECO Marketplace adds ready-to-deploy integrations across payments, energy management, smart charging, and fleet services, so new capabilities are switched on rather than built one connection at a time.
Velian leads its own migration
Velian brings real in-house experience with charger migrations and is running this rollout with its own team, supported by AMPECO on integration. A first group of B2B customers went live in July, public chargers across Groningen and Drenthe follow, and Amsterdam and Utrecht are planned towards the end of the year.
That phasing works because the cutover itself is built to go unnoticed. Chargers move across on a proxy-based approach that keeps them running through the switch. More than 300,000 charge points are connected to AMPECO today, and over 140,000 of them arrived this way, from in-house builds and from every major CPMS. For a network operating under concession service levels, a driver noticing nothing is the only acceptable outcome.
Compliance that arrives as an update
Regulation in this market moves faster than most roadmaps. AMPECO’s policy and regulations team tracks and helps shape frameworks, including AFIR in Europe, and the platform ships daily releases, so compliance changes arrive as updates instead of projects. That is the workload Velian’s team no longer has to carry, and time it puts back into reliability, its partnerships with municipalities, and businesses, and the B2B side of the business, it plans to grow further.
Explore why operators choose AMPECO when they want to own their network, or read how Allego, Swisscharge, and E.ON Drive Infrastructure made the move.
