Denver has had some aggregator activity which can significantly impact their interchange expense. The schemes aggregators use is to advertise to consumers and collect consumer payments as ach and then turn around and use high interchange card payments to the utility. They take the lowest cost payments and turn them into the highest cost payments for the utility. Unchecked, the risk of this opportunistic behavior is that it blows up the payment expense for utilities and can potentially cause customer confusion, as when the consumer pays the aggregator, they think they are paying the utility.

Without AI, utilities can't spot and keep up with these aggregators. In addition to the aggregator monitoring/real-time blocking, we can discuss how other utilities are using AI and machine learning to detect and shut down synthetic identity fraud and other payment schemes.