Current Choice | Bits Orchestra | Online marketplace for elecricity suppliers

Project goals

Project goal was to switch as many consumers as possible to a better plan by analyzing last 12 month consumption and locating the most suitable plans, providing side-by-side comparison and forecasting further fees based on last year consumption data.

Result

About the client

CurrentChoice is an online marketplace that lets customers compare electricity suppliers' pricing and switch. Our Bill-to-Bill comparison tool can get a customer's past 12 months of usage from their utility in real time and present all product comparisons using their past usage.

Project goals

Once a user makes a decision, the system allows to switch to a new plan online.

Key challenge

The biggest challenge was the amount of integrations with 3rd party systems:
- Services that allows getting users’ consumption data, so no need to enter it manually
- Multiple suppliers and utilities API in order to get available plans, their terms and conditions, pricing
- Multiple suppliers and utilities API to perform actual switch to a new plan

Another challenge was related to the fact that suppliers and utilities are available in particular locations as well as plans might be also available only in certain areas.

Our solutions

To integrate with all 3rd party API’s and services we had to unify all their interfaces into a single generic interface that our application used to communicate with them. In most cases we had to implement a unique adapter for 3rd party services, but utilizing them within the app was the same for all of them. Dependency injection and design patterns were quite handy for this project and allowed us to build flexible and extendable solution.

Result

Constant residential switches to other suppliers and utilities allowed Current Choice to generate more revenue, increasing its growth for 30-45% yearly in next couple of years after site integration with suppliers’ and utilities’ API’s and moving the entire process online, which significantly reduced the amount of men-hours needed to handle the process.