Transforming the E.ON prepayment and Kraken estate

The challenge

A large energy supplier serving around nine million customers had a prepayment portfolio that was quietly working against it. Prepayment is unforgiving. The margins are thin, the customers are often the most vulnerable, and small errors in data and settlement compound month after month rather than washing out. Here the root cause problems had been building for some time. Settlement imbalances were going unresolved, avoidable operating costs were baked into the way the segment ran, and the platform underneath it was not being held to what had been promised. None of this showed up as a single line anyone could point to. It leaked away across many small disparities, which is exactly why it had survived so long.

What PEF did

We led the transformation of the prepayment segment by going after the causes rather than the symptoms.

• Reviewed the segment rigorously to find the root cause issues behind the cost and the imbalances, rather than treating what was visible on the surface.
• Resolved settlement and imbalance disparities, correcting the underlying data instead of adjusting around it.
• Drove out avoidable operating cost that had quietly become normal in how the segment ran.
• Held the platform supplier to account against what had been committed, rather than accepting the position we were handed.

The result

The prepayment operation came out more efficient and better controlled, with the cost leakage identified and addressed and the data problems underneath it corrected. Just as important, the business understood where the value had been going and why, so the improvement was durable rather than a one off clean up.