Prepayment advances with smart-card solutions that cover electricity, gas and water

In the progression towards deregulation, many utilities are still struggling to define their strategy towards payment methods, and as such will need to be cautious with the approach they take. The implementation of a 2-way prepayment solution allows the utility/service provider the capability of removing the difficulties associated with traditional billing system (commissioning, meter reading, billing, payment and decommissioning). The advantages of prepayment are well known in these areas, however the issues of commissioning and decommissioning service, and other technical operations still remain to be solved without any increases in operational costs. The new requirement for common standards has been solved by the use of international standards such as Windows95 ^TM and Oracle^TM database operations. These allow the generation of system platform that caters for electricity, water and gas applications. The architecture is designed in order to deliver the first multi-energy system in the market, and if required, a single token can also be implemented to deal with multiple energies. The increased capabilities of the smart-card make it possible to implement more than one application on a single smart-card today. Electricity and gas prepayment, a loyalty program and credit card functionality can be implemented on the same smart card