Written by Sheree Hellier

Perseus will automate access to assurable SME electricity smart meter data and its carbon intensity at the time and place of use. SMEs will be able to receive emissions reports generated from these data and share them, via reporting solutions, with banks or lenders to unlock green finance.

As described in the 2024 Plan, Perseus members have been working throughout the year to uncover and explore the needs of all stakeholders in the data flow and convert these into concrete actions. These have driven detailed work on legal, technical and user experience design, assurability and process development to enable an operational pilot.

Purpose of the pilot

June marked the end of the six-month pilot phase of Perseus, which was launched to gather feedback on the technical, legal and user experience aspects of Perseus. Part of an iterative process, the pilot focused on reducing cost, removing friction and ultimately enhancing the way Perseus works for SMEs, energy data providers (EDPs), carbon accounting providers (CAPs) and financial service providers (FSPs). 

What did we do?

  • Tested the technical, legal and contractual elements of the trust framework.
  • Explored whether the onboarding documents were sufficient and useful to organisations joining the Perseus scheme. 
  • Checked the assured data flow of electricity consumption and derived emissions between participants.
  • Tested the user journey flow, design, product integration and legal agreements with a CAP, an EDP and a FSP. 

How did we do it?

The testing was conducted on a one-to-one basis with participants, and feedback was gathered during calls and/or shared via email.

What did we learn?

Several important lessons emerged:

  • SME UX: The overall Perseus user journey could be improved through the addition of simple but effective elements, such as a progress bar, providing the user with support and guidance throughout their Perseus journey. 
  • Clarity about who hosts what: Greater clarity is required on which stages of the Perseus journey are hosted by the EDP, the CAP and the FSP and to what extent the host can brand and integrate the Perseus journey stages.     
  • Engagement: attempts to engage FSPs during the pilot were not as successful as expected. This was mainly due to key stakeholders’ own constraints, needing to focus on other internal projects and not being able to put their own SME clients forward for user testing. To address this, we reached out to other stakeholders in the wider ecosystem to understand their barriers to participation and engagement and how to overcome these.      
  • Onboarding support and guidance: During the pilot we discovered that organisations had more questions when onboarding that we had anticipated. We have since updated the supporting documentation and produced clearer step-by-step guidance, with “readiness” checklists.
  • Cloud providers: Members whose servers are hosted by cloud providers had difficulty using private server certificates. We have now modified the technical requirements to enable them to use the same public certificate authorities as they would for any website or web service.
  • Liability and data retention: Members’ legal and compliance teams were comfortable joining the pilot because both the pilot agreement and associated data retention requirements were limited to the term of the pilot. This will inform timeframe considerations for production.
  • Green Lending Market: An observation from testing the pilot is that the green lending market is not as active as we anticipated for SMEs seeking green loans. We therefore don’t see a likely future function for Perseus to help with green loan selection for SMEs. 
  • Trust and clarity: The clarity of definition that the scheme provided proved vital in helping different actors understand their roles and responsibilities.
  • Case studies: A lack of engagement equaled a lack of real-life Perseus case studies from participants. As a result, IB1 increased its efforts to conduct stakeholder interviews, focusing on how stakeholders perceive their role and value within Perseus, and how IB1 can support them in becoming early adopters that other organisations can learn from.
  • Support and discussion channels: Support channels proved to be a challenge with some organisations finding it hard to use Slack. To provide more opportunities for focussed discussion, we introduced more targeted and frequent working group sessions, with shorter advisory group meetings tasked with decision-making rather than detailed discussion.
  • Language: Insight from the pilot emphasised that the language used to describe Perseus needs to be kept simple and appeal to different users. There is a responsibility to encourage SMEs to adopt green finance to help the financial sector deliver net zero and to support CAPs in easily calculating assurable emissions data.

Next steps

Perseus has now progressed to the ‘sandbox’ stage of the project; which officially launched on Monday 29th September. The Sandbox provides identical trust services (Registry and Directory) to Perseus in production, and includes a reference EDP that provides synthetic smart meter consumption data. It can safely be used for development and testing. 

Learnings from the pilot phase have been incorporated into the onboarding documentation. Perseus members are receiving one-to-one support and guidance through the sandbox and are encouraged to showcase their case studies.

The 2025 Perseus Report will be launched at the end of this year and will provide more detail on the Pilot, Sandbox and launch phases.