Hugo Technologies Ltd (Hugo) is a London-based tech company known for its Hugo Energy App which empowers households to better understand and manage their energy use.
Hugo needed energy market data to match app users’ home addresses with their meter details to make onboarding easier and quicker.
Challenge – Households need but often can’t find their meter details
Hugo’s mission is to help British households understand their energy usage. The Hugo Energy App tracks energy consumption through a household’s smart meter and shows usage data on a mobile phone instead of the error-prone in-home displays (IHDs) which suppliers distribute to their customers.
The app also provides users with budgeting tools, a 20-second switching service, energy efficiency tips and carbon offsetting.
During the onboarding process for the Hugo Energy App, the user needs to connect their smart meter to the app to start receiving usage data, typically requiring their property’s MPAN and current supplier. However, many domestic energy users and bill payers don’t understand what an MPAN is or where they can find it, and this causes delays in onboarding.
Hugo started looking for ways to make the user journey easier and opted to embed an address lookup function in the app so the user wouldn’t need their MPAN. This required a data provider whose solutions could match an address to the property’s meter information and supplier.
The Hugo team identified ElectraLink as a potential partner whose capabilities could meet their needs. ElectraLink’s credibility as energy market data experts also convinced the Hugo team that their valued app users would see a flawless service and accurate usage information on their mobiles.
Solution – Hugo chose QuoteRight Essentials to pull site-level data into the app
During initial talks with ElectraLink, Hugo identified that an API solution called QuoteRight Essentials would integrate seamlessly with their technology arrangements and provide exactly the data they needed to find a new app user’s postcode, address, MPAN and supplier details.
QuoteRight Essentials is a compact version of QuoteRight – ElectraLink’s most popular API – and provides a property’s meter information without consumption data. For the Hugo Energy App, consumption data is collected directly from the user’s smart meter.
Due to QuoteRight Essentials being an established API, the Hugo team did not need to embark on a long, resource-intensive product development collaboration with ElectraLink. App users give in-app consent for their data to be accessed, and ElectraLink carried out its standard governance process to meet internal requirements and to ensure Hugo’s policies and practices meet legal data protection conditions.
Hugo completed a testing stage to ensure the API returned the energy data they needed and functioned well, and within three months had its new functionality live on the app.
Result – Hugo customers find their address and are onboarded in a flash
Now that the Hugo Energy App is integrated with QuoteRight Essentials, over 50,000 household app users have been able to pull their MPAN number and current supplier from a postcode and address lookup, making onboarding efficient, pain-free and without needing human intervention. For households, it removes barriers to accessing their data and empowers decision making and budgeting throughout the ongoing cost of living crisis.
This function would not be possible without access to ElectraLink’s APIs and market-wide data lake which caters to a range of use cases. Unpredictable IHDs showing error messages and confusing customers are no longer a barrier to energy awareness and management.
According to Hugo founder and CEO, Ben Dhesi: “Hugo started using ElectraLink to source MPAN and Address information towards the end of 2022. It was the best decision we could have made as we now have UK access to this data for our users when they sign up. We have also found ElectraLink’s service desk fantastic and super responsive, which we never had before.”
