Fuel card and EV charging: one card, two energy flows

For a homogeneous combustion-engine fleet, energy management is straightforward: one card per vehicle, fill-ups billed in litres, a clean accounting export. EVs break that model. Cost is no longer measured in litres but in kilowatt-hours. The transaction no longer happens at a pump but at a third-party charge point operator's station, and the invoice arrives separately. Without a unified solution, every charging session becomes an isolated line item that has to be reconciled manually.

The impact shows up in accounting. For a plug-in hybrid that fills up at a petrol station and charges on a public charger in the same week, you get two receipts in two different formats with no shared key to link them to the same driver. Across thirty vehicles, that adds up to hours of manual reconciliation every month, an invisible cost that never appears in any pricing grid.

France's public charging network is split across dozens of charge point operators (CPOs): Ionity, Fastned, TotalEnergies, Electra, Allego, and a range of regional networks. Without a common mechanism, you would need a separate card for each operator. That is where roaming comes in: an agreement that lets a single card authenticate a session on chargers from different operators. The French platform GIREVE acts as the central hub^[3].

This interoperability is not a commercial option. It is mandatory in France for all public charge points since a 2017 decree^[1]. In practice, the actual coverage depends on the roaming agreements negotiated by the card issuer, which is why choosing a card with a broad network matters.

France's charging network has crossed a milestone: AVERE-France counted 179,876 public charge points as of 30 September 2025, up 20 % year-on-year^[4]. Behind those charge points, several mobility operators offer cards or badges that, via roaming, unlock access to a large share of them. A few players shape the market:

Because of roaming, a single card issuer can unlock multiple networks simultaneously. What matters for a fleet is not so much the brand name on the card as the breadth of roaming agreements in place. For a closer look at the infrastructure itself, our comparison of EV chargers for businesses covers technical specs and pricing, and the guide on how to choose a charge point rounds out the picture.

On an EV fleet, energy costs can vary fourfold depending on where vehicles plug in. At an employee's home or on a private charge point, the kilowatt-hour tracks the electricity tariff, roughly €0.15 to €0.21 depending on the contract and off-peak hours^[2]. At a standard public charger, the rate climbs to €0.38–0.60/kWh. At motorway fast chargers, it regularly exceeds €0.60/kWh. The ratio is 2.5 to 4 times higher.

For a fleet manager, that gap shapes strategy: home charging and private charge points should be the default; motorway fast charging should be reserved for long journeys. But that only works if you can see exactly where each kWh was purchased. That is the value of a back-office that logs every session with its location and per-kWh cost, a level of detail a standard fuel card, which only captures litres, simply cannot provide.

The real argument for consolidating both energy types is not the card itself. It is what the card feeds into your management platform. When fuel and charging flow into the same back-office, you get a complete energy cost for each vehicle: diesel litres on one side, kilowatt-hours on the other, both converted to a comparable cost-per-kilometre figure. On a mixed fleet, this is the only way to objectively benchmark a combustion vehicle, a plug-in hybrid, and a fully electric one.

In practice, a unified fleet management platform lets you track consumption by driver, set spend limits, and export a single accounting file, instead of juggling statements from a fuel provider and invoices from a charging operator. On the EV side, session-level detail (operator, kWh, cost, geolocation) also feeds the mobility reporting that CSR policies and the CSRD directive increasingly demand.

For drivers, the experience becomes simpler too. No more switching between the corporate card, this operator's app, and a personal card as a fallback: one card works at petrol stations and public charge points alike, and employees never have to pay out of pocket. For a deeper dive into choosing a multi-network card, our comparison of the best multi-network fuel cards breaks down coverage and fees.

Even with no combustion vehicles left, the single-card argument holds. A fully electric fleet still needs to manage tolls and parking, plus occasional meal vouchers or hotel expenses. Keeping a card dedicated solely to charging is accepting fragmentation all over again: one tool for energy, another for everything else. A multi-purpose card that treats charging as one feature among several avoids that renewed silo, a clear win for SMBs and micro-businesses that lack the resources to integrate multiple providers.