Challenge

Driven by ambitious net-zero goals, utility companies across the UK are investing heavily in renewable energy and upgrading the power grid. Alongside these efforts, companies are also modernizing their digital infrastructure to deliver simpler and more responsive customer service.

EDF UK is one of the industry leaders innovating on both of those fronts. In 2023, the rapidly growing company chose to migrate its digital platforms to Kraken, a global operating system for energy that has partnered with Stripe to enable various payment methods, including cards and direct debit, for utilities globally. As part of this digital transformation, EDF wanted to upgrade its payment infrastructure to improve its customers’ payment experience.

The company’s new payment processor would have to seamlessly integrate with its Kraken-powered customer portal and provide the stability and reliability to support high volumes of payments each month. Additionally, EDF wanted the ability to easily offer a range of payment options to encourage more customers to pay their monthly bills online.

“EDF has continued to grow, while navigating net-zero initiatives and adapting to broader shifts in the utility sector,” said Simon Durrant, Product Owner of Payments and Collections at EDF. “Through it all, our priority has been supporting our customers, and improving our payment experience is part of how we make their lives easier.” said Simon Durrant, Product Owner of Payments and Collections at EDF.

Solution

During the migration, the Kraken team recommended that EDF switch from its previous payment provider and introduced them to Stripe. With Stripe’s developer-friendly API, Kraken was able to easily integrate Stripe Payments directly into EDF’s online payment portal, giving customers a self-service platform for managing their utility accounts and paying bills.

To improve its checkout and offer customers more payment options, EDF adopted Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes embeddable UI components and access to more than 125 global payment methods. EDF designed a customized checkout flow using the in-app Payment Sheet, a prebuilt UI for in-app payments, which gave customers a variety of payment methods, including card payments and digital wallets like Apple Pay. To further streamline the checkout experience, EDF added Link, a digital wallet built by Stripe that securely saves and autofills customers’ payment details for future purchases.

In 2024, EDF enhanced its Stripe implementation with Adaptive Acceptance, which uses AI to intelligently retry transactions in real time, optimizing ISO messaging to recover false payment declines and recapture lost revenue.

EDF partnered with Stripe’s professional services team to guide its Payments implementation. The team worked closely with EDF, hosting several workshops to plan its implementation and analyze the various integration points the company would need for its integration with Payments and Kraken. Stripe professional services helped EDF manage integration risks, troubleshoot blockers, and field ad hoc questions to ensure the company could maintain momentum towards launch.

Results

Modern payment infrastructure supports more than 13 million payments annually

By integrating Stripe’s payments infrastructure, EDF created a modern payment experience focused on customer needs. Benefitting from Stripe’s industry-leading uptime of 99.999%, EDF is able to seamlessly process more than 13 million payments per year.

“With a customer base of more than 5 million accounts, if anything was to go wrong with payment processing, it’d have a really significant impact, and my biggest compliment to Stripe is that everything works very reliably,” Durrant said.

Self-serve payment portal and in-app payments make paying bills easy

EDF’s self-serve payment portal was designed to meet customers’ growing expectations for payment flexibility and independence. The portal, powered by Payments and the Optimized Checkout Suite, enables customers to easily pay utility bills at their convenience, using their preferred payment method. With the in-app Payment Sheet, EDF can easily turn on additional payment methods in the future, with no additional code.

“Our customers want to pay bills themselves, without needing to call. The self-serve portal gives them a better customer experience, while our business gains cost and operational efficiency. Our service teams can focus their time on speaking to the customers that we really need to,” said Durrant.

Adaptive Acceptance improves authorization rates and generates £1.1 million in revenue uplift

EDF saw an uplift in successful first-time payments with Adaptive Acceptance, resulting in £1.1 million in recaptured revenue over a 12-week period. The company has permanently implemented Adaptive Acceptance to continue improving authorization rates.