As far as I’m aware, yup for the most part.

Boost is a trading name that OVO uses, and it’s primarily so that OVO can have one brand dedicated to Pay Monthly and another to Pay As You Go. Same head office, same licenses from Ofgem and same (almost) everything in a way. The only big difference I can think of outside of branding and customer base, is that I think there’s dedicated Support Teams for each side.

For accounts, there’s currently two different billing systems. There’s the legacy billing system, which was built by a third party and OVO bought in, and the new billing platform, built in-house by OVO’s sister company Kaluza.

Everyone who signs up to OVO now gets the new billing platform by default, while Boost members get the legacy billing system right now. There’s still a few thousand OVO members on the old system, but over 90% have been migrated to the new one. Of the remainder, I’m told some of them were just really late in the queue and the rest are highly complicated accounts that need a lot more attention to migrate properly. It makes a lot more sense to get the easy accounts done first using automation, so that you’re left with only the tricky ones and less noise. Once the last member has migrated to the new billing platform, the legacy system will be terminated on OVO’s side.

At the moment, all Boost PAYG accounts are still on the legacy system, because the new billing platform didn’t have PAYG functionality when it first launched. It makes more sense for Kaluza to build out the Pay Monthly features first and get the common baseline in place that works for both sides, before building PAYG specific features. Prepayment support is now being tested as I believe you’re aware but this will take a while. Once testing is complete, the plan is to migrate all Boost members over to the new billing platform as well, again being done slowly in waves to help ensure a reliable migration. Once the last Boost member has been migrated, OVO and Boost will fully terminate the legacy system and probably end the contract with the provider.

This will ultimate result in OVO and Boost members being on the same billing platform, but most likely with some kind of isolation in place for security reasons.

That’s all I know right now.

Blastoise186

That is a awful  lot of knowledge for a volunteer  how much training do they give you ?

Sooner boost move to OVO the better was a big mistake  hiving it off but at least they have seen the light

Poor  Ezekiel  must be really confused who is assigned to Boost or OVO

Least when /if Tom rings  i have a few answers 

Training? Erm… None! XD

I’m pretty much entirely self-taught but some of the other members of the forum have helped me out along the way. Sadly, some of them are no longer active but it all helped me out anyway. On top of that, I’ve got resources at my disposal like SmartMe which is a treasure trove by itself. Otherwise, it’s just down to a crazy amount of research, personal experience and an awful lot of digging through this forum. The amount of knowledge I have rivals the Support Team and I’ve been asked many times if I happen to work for OVO or in the energy industry. I can safely say I never have for either of those. My actual job is in cybersecurity for a company that has absolutely no relations to energy.

I’m not totally in at the deep end though. I have extremely long PM threads with both Tim (43 pages going back to November 2020) and Jess (10 pages going back to April 2021) and they’ll often give me advice if they think I need it. There’s also the Plan Zero Hero Treehouse, which is a hidden category for me to chat with other members who’ve been given a key. Right now, it mostly acts as a drafting space for my forum guides (it’s perfect for that!) but I want to make it more active once I get more friends in there to chat to. And I also have calls with Tim every so often to catch up more deeply.

The other thing I get, is that I’m sometimes given a heads up on big changes a bit faster than most people, but it’s often under the promise of keeping it confidential. Most of the time, it's just to let me know in advance so that I can adapt dynamically. One easy example is that OVO Interest Reward is no longer a thing for new members, so as soon as Tim gave me a heads up, I ceased to mention it to anyone else within minutes. These days, I do still mention it, but only in response to a specific question about it. Tim’s OK with me doing it that way, but I otherwise allow it to fade into the archives.

And my final source of knowledge? Let’s just say I’m very good at figuring things out. There’s actually one or two things I know about OVO’s future plans right now which are definitely nowhere near going public anytime soon, even before Tim found out. For those items, I don’t even give away a single hint until after a publicly available official launch or announcement comes out. Once X thing is publicly launched, it’s fair game for me to talk about it. :)