The Management of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company PLC (BEDC), on Monday said it had engaged the services of 11 aggregators and 10,000 billing and payment agents to serve customers across it’s franchise states Edo, Delta, Ondo and Ekiti.
The Managing Director and CEO of BEDC, Dr Henry Ajagbawa, disclosed this during an interactive session with BEDC billing and payment partners in Benin.
Ajagbawa noted that the engagement of the billing and payment aggregators and agents was to ensure a seamless vending and payment platforms across BEDC franchise states.
“One of the pivot of BEDC is the ability to bill our customers after we have provided our services and our ability to collect our funds after we have billed our customers.
“The challenges we faced when we came into office was that we had just one aggregator about 1,650 billing and payment agents.
” And most customers had complained that they are unable to pay their bills because they cannot find agents to pay their bills through.
” Our operations spans through rural and urban areas in four states and there are no agents in most of our operations areas.
” So the issue really is that customers want to pay but there are no agents to pay through.
“So, we thought that the best way to serve our customers is to give them the convenient of being able to track down an agent within the proximity of the areas they live.
“What we did is to break the monopoly of one aggregator that we met on ground”, he said.
According to him, ‘we have therefore, appointed 11 aggregators who will come with over 10,000 agents to serve customers across BEDC franchise states”.
He explained that the company had concluded plans to reconnect communities that were disconnected from the national grid.
He said” we have told ourselves that we will push electricity to the rural areas and in doing so, we are going to engage with them on how to pay through our agency expansion programme,” he added.
Ajagbawa further disclosed that the company has also introduced a revenue assurance platform that would monitor the aggregators to ensure integrity in the process.
