Vector deal gives Talgentra lion's share of power billing

Auckland firm Talgentra has won a $2 million deal to consolidate lines company Vector's network billing systems on its Gentrack utility billing platform.

The deal confirms Talgentra's dominance in the New Zealand power industry: Gentrack is used by four of the five main electricity retailers and seven lines companies, and Gentrack for Networks will now control more than 70 per cent of energy distribution billing.

Gentrack general manager James Docking said about half the budget would come to Talgentra as licence and services revenue, and the rest was work Vector would do internally or with other consultants.

Vector networks service 725,000 electricity and gas customers, mainly in Auckland and Wellington.

The lines company currently runs three billing and customer information systems. Gentrack for Networks replaces systems inherited from UnitedNetworks and Mercury.

Vector revenue manager Tony Hooks said the lines company needed to audit revenue coming from retailers who billed on its behalf.

"When the industry restructured, the result was we ended up dealing with several retailers operating their own records," Hooks said.

"As distributors, we realised we needed to keep our own sets of records or our revenues would be impacted."

He said Gentrack was chosen because it demonstrated that customer sites here and in Australia were successfully using the network billing product.

Gentrack's dominance in the retail market also helped.

"We wanted tight integration with our customers," Hooks said.

"Gentrack also has a lot of industry experience in this country so we can talk to them about business issues, not technology. With previous vendors, we found we spent a lot of time telling our suppliers how things worked."

Other short-listed vendors included Auckland companies Peace and Kinetic, and United States firm SPL.

Docking said to win the sale, Gentrack had to prove it could process 1200 bills a minute.

Talgentra is also winning business across the Tasman, with Gentrack selected by two start-up retailers, Our Neighbourhood Energy in Victoria and Option One in Tasmania.

 

Option One and associated company Powerco Tasmania are subsidiaries of New Zealand's Powerco, set up to distribute and retail gas in Tasmanian urban centres.

 

The Gentrack division of British-owned Talgentra has 120 staff in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and England, and now has 35 sites in 10 countries for its electricity, gas, water and telecommunications billing systems.

It also makes debt-collection and airport billing software.