Energy & Utilities Insights
Insights
Actionable insights for the sector's most pressing topics
Challenges like rising debt, sustainability targets, and regulatory reforms are driving suppliers to fundamentally rethink how they operate. At the same time, these shifts present opportunities to differentiate, drive innovation, and enhance customer service. As organisations attempt to balance financial performance with compliance and customer satisfaction, staying ahead of competitors is crucial.
Leveraging the deep expertise of our industry specialists, we help energy and utilities providers to tackle these challenges, and capitalise on opportunities shaping the future of the sector.
INSIGHTS
Energy & Utilities
April renewals: Are your customers in the market before you’ve quoted?
Our analysis of B2B tenders shows suppliers had quoted around half of competitor customers four months before contract start, compared with a fifth of their own renewals. Here’s why that matters for the April 2027 round, and three ways to get ahead.
What will it take to electrify businesses? With EDF Director Raghav Singh
Hannah Sword sat down with Raghav Singh, Director of Business Supply at EDF, as part of our expert interview series. They discussed the challenges and opportunities within business energy. From useful data and proactive customers, to economics and electrification.
Six ways operational excellence creates value for energy networks
Operational excellence is more than a cost programme. Done well, it creates six forms of value: sustainable expenditure reduction, better customer outcomes, stronger workforce productivity, faster change adoption, improved asset decisions and greater regulatory resilience.
The overlooked opportunity in Britain’s electricity networks: iDNOs and multi-utility operators
The Electricity Networks Sector Growth Plan sets out £181bn of regulated network investment to 2035. Mark Hewett explores the growing role iDNOs and multi-utility operators can play alongside it, and why visibility of demand across the whole electrification market matters for kit, skills and investment.
Leadership webinar key takeaways
Five leaders from across the energy industry joined our latest webinar to share what they’ve learned about leading through change. We’ve pulled together their advice on managing risk, developing as a leader and learning from other sectors.
Three ways energy networks can find efficiency savings year after year
Sustained productivity will not come from isolated projects. The greatest opportunities lie in connecting field service, asset management and customer operations into one end-to-end value chain, supported by the right data, governance and leadership.
Why leadership, not strategy, is what often limits delivery in utilities
Most organisations already have sensible objectives. What often falls short is what happens after they’re written. In the third and final article in our Leadership that delivers series, Kev Brown looks at why execution is a leadership capability, how momentum is lost after launch, and what changed when leaders built stronger habits around review, accountability and follow-through.
The new efficiency imperative
Productivity is now part of the regulatory settlement for energy networks. This first article in our series explores what that means in practice, and how leaders can build the capability to keep improving year after year.
MHHS: Turning meter performance visibility into commercial advantage
MHHS is making meter faults more visible and more expensive. We look at how leading suppliers are using that visibility to fix operational gaps, build stronger partnerships and turn metering data into commercial advantage.
Sales Excellence isn’t an accident. Great sales teams run on a framework
This article looks at what that framework can look like in practice, the behaviours it needs to reinforce, and how leaders can use it to build greater consistency across their sales team.
The Future of Multi-Utilities: Yes, We’ve Invested in Digital. And Now What?
Most multi-utilities have already started investing significantly in their digital foundations. Now, the challenge is ensuring those investments are genuinely reducing complexity and improving scalability.
B2B energy suppliers have more data than ever, so why are commercial decisions still so slow?
B2B energy suppliers have more commercial data than ever, yet decisions on margin, retention and pricing still take too long. This article looks at why more dashboards rarely help, the foundations that turn data into commercial intelligence, and how one supplier lifted conversion from 1% to over 5% by focusing on the decisions that matter most.
Energy & Utilities
Meet the Team
Ian Barker
Managing Partner
Ian shapes the BFY vision and inspires our team to bring it to life, while remaining central to complex client engagements in Strategy, Commercial, and Operations.
Rachel Littlewood
Partner
Rachel leads our operational and financial turnaround engagements, helping to solve complex operational challenges while maximising commercial performance and customer outcomes.
Kelly Payne
Director
Kelly helps clients achieve operational excellence to improve customer outcomes, employee engagement, and optimising cost to serve.
Energy & Utilities
Our Impact
Strategic analysis identifies ~£103m in opportunities for energy retailer
We delivered strategic analysis for a large energy retailer, identifying up to ~£103m in incremental revenue opportunities, through a comprehensive Market Scan Analysis and Sales Channel Maturity Assessment.
Cash recovery initiatives deliver ~£275m benefit for large Energy supplier
Our debt team supported a large Energy supplier with recovering their cash position, achieving a total benefit of ~£275m through collaborative initiatives.
£8.5m cash collection for large energy retailer
We helped a large energy retailer to generate immediate in-year debt benefits through tactical interventions. Our programme delivered ~£4.5m in Bad Debt benefit and ~£8.5m in cash collection, all while maintaining customer and productivity measures within the operation.
Large energy supplier avoids ~£7.5m in complaints costs
We supported a large energy supplier with a transformation programme, looking at how they can manage their complaints inflow and address the growing backlog. The programme transformed their complaints capability and resulted in ~£7.5m in cost avoidance.
Collections improvements deliver ~£5m cash for Water retailer
We supported a B2B Water retailer with a series of collections improvements, achieving a cash uplift of ~£5m in five months.
Tactical debt improvements deliver ~£7m cash for large Energy retailer
A large Energy retailer was facing significant challenges with customer debt, requiring improvements to their collections processes to mitigate this. Their total debt was ~£100m at the time of engaging BFY, with communication gaps present across the customer debt journey.
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