EAI welcomes the opportunity to respond to CRU’s Consultation on Smart Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG). We understand that the objective of this consultation is to inform policy decisions which need to be made for Smart PAYG to go live in 2022 and indeed where appropriate reconsider policy decisions made in 2015. EAI is the representative body for electricity suppliers on the island of Ireland and this consultation on Smart PAYG concerns two distinct groups of electricity consumers, as PAYG services uniquely serve both lifestyle choice and financial hardship customer. As such, the policy requirements of these two very different cohorts of customers must be carefully considered in the CRU’s policy formulation in the next number of months.
The EAI welcomes the new capability of Smart PAYG services as they have an important role to play in the overall management of consumer debt across the market as well as for consumers in financial hardship. With these improvements however, the user experience for Smart PAYG will be very different from the user experience for the PAYG solutions currently in the market. In this consultation response, the EAI makes suggestions on Smart PAYG to help ensure it is an attractive solution for customers.