Itron, Inc. announced that it has strengthened its long-term collaboration with PayGo and welcomes the billing and payment solution provider into Itron's expanding ecosystem of distributed intelligence (DI) applications. Using Itron's DI platform, PayGo integrated its billing customer experience into Itron's DI-enabled Riva meters in order to provide consumers with a comprehensive real-time view of energy consumption and remaining energy credit balance through Itron Smart Pay, Itron's smart payment Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution. The DI application works in concert with Itron Smart Pay and enables consumers to better control their payments and budget their overall energy usage, enhancing the user experience.

The application will be demonstrated at DISTRIBUTECH, May 23-25, in Itron booth #2403. The DI application features PayGo's algorithm, which works inside Itron's Riva meters, enabling consumers to gain access to their energy consumption in real time without worrying about the typical lag time associated with usage information being collected by the utility on a periodic basis. With this DI functionality, consumers can configure settings through Itron Smart Pay to personalize alerts such as low account balances and payment due dates.

PayGo's DI algorithm monitors energy usage threshold information in real time, and sends alerts to Itron Smart Pay, which will send text messages to the energy consumer. This gives the consumer greater flexibility to prepay whenever they want and for how much they want. According the Prepay Energy Working Group, by providing consumers flexible billing and payment options as well as real time information, consumers may be able to change their energy consumption behavior and potentially reduce their energy bills by up to 12% and potentially increase customer satisfaction for the utility by 10 points or more.

Itron's robust DI platform allows innovators to build open, interoperable, value-driven applications on Itron's secure platform that evolve with market and consumer demands. The DI development program enables an ecosystem of third-party developers to ensure a greater selection of applications to meet utility needs and into the future. These applications are available via the Itron Enterprise Application Center, which features an increasingly diverse portfolio of Itron and third-party applications that connect to Itron's industry-leading, IoT-based network.

The Itron Enterprise Application Center is the operational backbone for utility customers to manage applications for their customers via a private, secure web portal.