Paying for EV charging today is often more complex than the easy exchange of money at the gas pump.

As more drivers and fleet operators make the switch to EVs, streamlining that payment process presents an opportunity for companies with experience in the space.

Enter: Fleetcor, a global payments company that acquired the EV charging and software provider Plugsurfing last month for an undisclosed amount.

• Plugsurfing has more than 300,000 charge points in Europe, which it claims represent nearly 80% of the region’s EV charge points.

Big picture: The deal brings Fleetcor, one of the world’s largest providers of fuel cards for commercial fleets, into the EV charging space—a relatively nascent sector where systems and payments are still very fragmented, David Morris, principal analyst for payments and commerce at Insider Intelligence, told Emerging Tech Brew.

“[Fleetcor] is seeing an opportunity here to be able to transition into this new energy delivery method,” Morris said. “It wants to be able to have the same kind of network built up on that EV charging side of things that it does with gasoline.”

Read about the strategy behind the deal here.—GD

There we were on a recent Friday morning, in a DHL delivery truck, driving through the chaos of 38th Street in midtown Manhattan. But it was so quiet inside that when you spoke, you half-expected a librarian to shush you.

We were in a Ford Transit 350 cargo van, but this one had been souped-up (souped-down?) by Lightning eMotors, which installs battery power under the hoods in place of rumbling gas engines.

It’s one of 51 fully electric vehicles in DHL’s last-mile delivery fleet in Manhattan, with another 45 being hybrid-electric. Manhattan, it turns out, with 53.1% of its delivery fleet fully electric, is nearly a microcosm of DHL’s ambitious global plans for electrifying its delivery fleet.

• DHL has stated that by 2030, 60% (a total of more than 80,000) of its last-mile global fleet will be fully electric.
• By comparison, the USPS announced this year only 10% of the 50,000 last-mile trucks it was purchasing would be electric; now it says it will purchase 50%.

Zoom in: Tony Grimila has been delivering for DHL for almost seven years. We tagged along because we wondered, as carriers electrify their fleets, whether these EVs are up to the task. And if people like Grimila, who are driving them day in and day out, think that they—in every sense of the word—deliver.

Read the full recounting of the ride-along from Retail Brew.—AAN

We’re in, like, year 10 of every company realizing they need to digitally transform lest they incur the wrath of disruptive digital upstarts. That goes for financial institutions, too, bastions of tradition though they may sometimes seem to be.

Last week…We asked whether any of you had tried out a financial institution’s chatbot tech, whether text- or voice-based. The results are in:

• Just under half (47%) of our ~1,150 respondents said they had used the tech before. The remaining 53% said they never touched the stuff.

Zoom out: As we reported last week, the voice-powered features offered by financial institutions are still pretty limited and perhaps not all that useful as of yet.

As a result, most banks are working on building out text-based features alongside voice options. A key example is Bank of America, which recently announced that its Erica virtual assistant has been used more than 1 billion times by 32 million customers since its release in 2018.

Read our piece from last week to go deeper on the topic.

This week’s poll: The EU gave final approval to its USB-C mandate for devices this week. Do you think this was the right move?

Yes
No
IDK

Stat: The Biden administration has a goal of increasing offshore wind production from its current level of 1 gigawatt to 30 gigawatts by 2030, but per the Financial Times, the goal is threatened by a host of complications, from sluggish permitting to inflation.

Quote: “There are no standards for uptime, reliability like you have at gas stations. It just doesn’t exist.”—Kameale C. Terry, CEO and co-founder of ChargerHelp!, to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: Can hybrid animal meats, like hybrid cars and EVs, be a stepping stone toward cultivated meat?

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• Who is responsible for a broken EV charger? This company wants to help the industry figure it out
• Why Chipotle created a $50 million venture fund this year
• Fitbit expands enterprise ambitions with Google Cloud-powered software platform