EY partners with Microsoft for CDR compliance in energy sector
As the Consumer Data Right compliance deadlines draw closer for the energy sector, Ernst & Young and Microsoft have come together to offer a new service aimed at reducing risk and cost.
Professional services firm Ernst & Young has teamed up with Microsoft to support energy sector clients with Consumer Data Right (CDR) compliance, leveraging their previous experience working with the banking sector. In the pipeline since 2018, the CDR is designed to grant consumers greater access to and control over their data, with the new obligations due to come into effect for some of Australia’s larger energy retailers before the end of next year.
To help energy clients reduce their costs and risks around compliance, EY and Microsoft have assembled a 12-strong team of experts with previous experience in supporting the banking sector during the first phase of the CDR implementations. For the new joint offering, EY will retool its existing open banking solution as the Fuse Consumer Data Right platform, which is built on Microsoft Azure services hosted in the company's local data-centres.
“Microsoft is excited to work with EY and extend the Fuse service into the energy sector, leveraging market leading technologies to support clients’ CDR needs,” commented Jo Dooley, Microsoft’s ANZ region general manager for Enterprise. “Fuse offers a low risk, high value approach as demonstrated in the banking sector and through this collaboration we will now be able to streamline CDR compliance for energy companies.”
First introduced by the federal government in 2017 as a lever to stimulate competition and product and service innovation in three priority consumer sectors (telecommunications will follow energy), CDR in the banking sector eventually came into effect in the middle of last year. EY, however, says that the banks had vastly underestimated the time, costs, and resources required to meet compliance deadlines despite the apparently lengthy lead-in.
“The recently set deadlines give a hard target for the energy sector and there is a lot of work to be done,” said EY Oceania Power & Utilities leader Igor Sadimenko. “There are considerable risk variables and associated costs that are not being adequately tackled by the energy sector based on what we saw when financial services were similarly going through this, and we are determined to help the energy sector leverage those lessons.”
EY and Microsoft contend that its Fuse service will allow energy retailers to meet their obligations in a much shorter time-frame, with significantly less risk and cost in doing so. In addition, the service also provides data recipient consent, access and control services, enabling accredited ‘data recipients’ to tap into new data streams in forming detailed customer insights, in turn supporting the development of new and innovative products for customers.
