Alinta Energy taps MA Moelis to shop billing platform
Two months after Alinta Energy hived off its Pilbara power generation assets to APA Group for $1.7 billion, its executives have dug up another carve-out candidate – this time from their back office.
Alinta Energy boss Jeff Dimery has been busy on the M&A circuit.
Street Talk can reveal that the Asian-owned energy retailer has mandated MA Moelis to shop Alinta Core, its proprietary billing and customer management software platform, which already services circa 700,000 accounts.
Alinta is understood to have fielded inbound interest, before kicking off a wider search. Early investor marketing is under way, with potential buyers being told to brace for a sale process down the line.
Flyers have just gone out to energy retailers and financial investors, and potential suitors are being pointed to UK-headquartered Octopus Energy’s operating system Kraken to make a case for Alinta Core’s future potential.
Kraken has migrated more than 30 big energy companies’ accounts to its platform, and now services 30 million customers across 16 countries – and Alinta and its advisers reckon there’s no reason why Alinta Core shouldn’t be able to do the same under right ownership.
Prospective bidders are being told Alinta built its up-for-sale platform from the ground up to improve operational efficiency, lower costs and – this is a big one – to avoid expensive regulatory fines from billing and servicing errors. Developed over the past five to six years, it is a “purpose-built” modern alternative to older and clunkier applications based on SAP or Oracle.
The cloud-native platform serves up a single view of each customer, all the way from onboarding and account creation to collections, service variation and assurance. The flyer said the platform is “central” to Alinta’s technology infrastructure and has been developed by its internal technology team with Melbourne-based energy specialist, Beige Technologies.
The flyer listed some numbers to firm up Alina CORE’s efficacy. Monthly calls per customer have fallen 48 per cent from pre-CORE levels, while the average handling time has come down by 18 per cent, according to the flyer. It added Alinta’s management of unbilled exceptions halved between June 2022 and September 2023.
The platform has gone live with about 700,000 customers from Alinta’s East Coast business, which should deliver an instant SaaS-style revenue stream for its future owner. The energy retailer is holding on to another 440,000 customers that the buyer could port in by early 2025.
For there, it would be up to the new owners to woo other utilities companies in Australia and abroad. The flyer said the local target addressable market was worth $600 million, while developing multi-product use cases (aka listing utilities other than gas) would let Alinta CORE play in a $2 billion market. Casting the net wider still, international expansion was listed as a $17 billion market.
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