The full business case anticipated ‘mid-case’ financial savings of around £1.2 million per year. The latest analysis puts this figure at £2.5m (£2.1m at 2020/21 prices)
The programme was established to make the interactions between retailers and wholesalers simpler, faster and more reliable, saving trading parties time and money and improving the service customers receive.
An initial review was carried out in March 2022, six months after the launch of the central bilateral hub and the first standardised process. This latest report looks at the benefits being achieved with five processes live in the hub.
According to trading party feedback and performance data, the bilateral transactions hub is significantly reducing the amount of time it takes trading parties to manage processes.
For example, retailers have reported that the time taken to initiate service requests has fallen from 5-30 minutes pre-hub to 1-5 minutes now. Similarly, wholesalers are reporting that processing requests is now taking 3-5 minutes, compared to 5-25 minutes previously.
Checking the status of service requests, which used to involve telephone calls or exchanging emails, now takes a matter of seconds to log into the hub.
The number of service requests being rejected due to incomplete information has also fallen from 14% to 6%, meaning more requests are succeeding first time. The time taken to process them has also fallen from 30 minutes to 5 minutes or less.
Commenting on the findings, John Gilbert, Programme Director, said: “The benefit realisation reports are ‘moments of truth’ when we check whether all the time and effort is paying off.
“We are delighted that efficiency savings are significantly above our original expectations. It means trading parties are providing better, faster service to customers and resolving issues more quickly, which reducing costs at the same time.
“We are also pleased to hear that trading parties are finding the web portal easy to use, which is making training faster and helping scale back the size of the team needed to process bilaterals.”
The latest report is available on the MOSL website here. A final benefit analysis is due to be published in early 2023, following the completion of the current Ofwat-mandated phase of the programme.
MOSL’s Business Plan 2023/24 will include proposals to extend the programme for a further two years to add the remaining lower-priority processes to the hub, which will allow wholesalers to switch off their legacy systems.
For more information about the Bilateral Transactions Programme, please email
