Pre-payment cards - are they more expensive?

chris1973

If you want to pay the same on a prepay meter, switch to ebico.

This makes the huge assumption that Ebico is already the most competitive supplier in every region of the UK.

Based on my annual usage, Ebico still puts my annual Electricity bill at £1214 a year, whilst the best credit deal remains at £992 from Ovo, followed by £1057 from Co-Operative. Is there some secret MSE tariff with Ebico which I don't know about?, because I can't work out how is this paying the same?.

Ebico would only be of any use if it was matching or bettering the tariffs available from every other supplier, including Ovo and Co-Op Energy, and in this region Ebico are far more expensive, so thanks but no thanks.

Your supplier has to pay the shop for processing your payments. Paypoint also take a cut.

Hence my point about issuing customers with USB terminals and topping their key up online over the internet. No Shop, and we can scrap the paypoint terminals as they are clearly costing too much. This isn't some futuristic idea, British Gas are already using it. The majority of suppliers also routinely offer customers an online account based access, where they can submit readings and pay bills online, so the main IT infrastructure is already there and so there wouldn't be an awful lot of costs involved with prepayment customers topping up via using the same online system,

Quarterly Payment customers who pay by credit card or the Elderly who still pay over the counter down the post office only pay around 1.5% more than Direct Debit Customers, which I guess covers the both the cost of paying the post office for their services, and any merchant service costs involved with processing their payments using the online method, so the average of 6%+ which Prepayment customers pay above that, is still ludicrous in respect of covering sundry charges.

SwanJon

Chris, my comment wasn't about cost, more about how you were limited in methods of topping up because the meter is not connected to any payment mechanism.

There are extra costs with prepayment meters over quarterly bills, you mention paying at the shop - PP customers will make that payment around 10-20x more often, so the cost of doing so plays a bigger part.

Other costs include the management of the meters themselves, the network for the messages to and from the meter as well as the network for payments and the devices themselves.

I assume that smart metering offers the opportunity to set up a more efficient and cheaper support mechanism - the current gas one is essentially the same one that was launched 20 years ago.

You suggest that quarterly is 4.5% cheaper than PP, but this isn't the case for most suppliers.