Secure and Mobile-Friendly Utility Billing App

About Our Client

The Client is a US-based fintech startup delivering billing solutions for the residential utilities sector. The company continuously expands its software product range to introduce comprehensive energy consumption insights and convenient bill payment experiences for utility customers.

Paytech Skills Needed to Build a Specialized Billing App

The Client wanted to launch a web application that would let householders track their utility consumption, pay utility bills, and analyze historical utility expenses. Utility service providers would get the ability to automate billing flows, track received and due payments, manage consumer incentives and rewards, and set up personalized advertising.

The Client relied on its in-house team for app development. To deliver multi-utility billing and digital payment functionality and meet tight deadlines, the company decided to ramp up its team with third-party paytech competencies. ScienceSoft came across as a trustworthy team augmentation vendor with 16 years of experience in financial software development.

UI Design and Back-End Development for a Utility Billing Application

ScienceSoft provided a lead .NET developer and a UI designer that joined the Client’s utility billing app development team. Our experts quickly integrated into the company’s Agile development flows and stuck to the team’s regular communication pace.

ScienceSoft’s UI designer created a clear visual appearance for the app to streamline its navigation and drive high user adoption. He implemented a responsive design to ensure the app looks well across desktop and mobile screens. This removed the need to develop a separate mobile app while ensuring convenience and accessibility for mobile users. The Client received UI mockups and a UI kit reflecting the app’s visual style. Since the company planned to offer the product as a white-label solution, our expert also introduced tailored UI design options communicating the brand identity of the Client’s major utility partners to speed up the app launch.

ScienceSoft’s .NET developer was involved in building the app’s user-facing functionality and secure back end for payment processing. Collaborating closely with the Client’s team, our expert delivered the following features:

Householder features

• Self-registration, managing personal and billing data.
• Tracking open and paid utility bills by category: electricity, heating, gas, water, telecoms, etc.
• Paying bills via the preferred payment method: bank transfer, card, check, and more.
• Utility spend analytics (by period, utility category, payment method).
• Monitoring property-specific risks (pollution, flood, green energy availability, crime level in the area, etc.), property market prices, local weather, and more.
• End-to-end audit trail of account activities.

Utility provider features

• Scheduled and ad hoc multi-utility bill submission to householders.
• Consumer payment behavior and utility usage analytics.
• Customer incentive and reward management.
• Setting up and managing personalized in-app advertising to promote utility provider services, smart home devices, and more.
• Automated generation of advertising performance reports.

Payment automation features

• Real-time processing of multi-currency utility payments.
• Payment auto-deductions by ACH direct debit.
• Configurable notifications to householders on due, successful, and failed payments.
• Automated generation of payment receipts.

Security features

• KYC verification for the app users.
• Multi-factor user authentication.
• Role-based access control.
• Encryption of consumer and payment data in transit and at rest.
• Payment data sharing and storage in accordance with PCI DSS requirements.

To enable automated data exchange and streamline billing, ScienceSoft’s .NET expert established app integrations with:

• Payment gateways of the selected banks and non-bank payment processors — to enable straight-through utility bill payment processing.
• Internal systems of property data providers — to capture up-to-date information about area-specific risks, property prices, weather, carbon footprint, and more.
• Amazon Ads (a digital advertising management platform) — to offer convenient launching and management of in-app advertising campaigns to utility service providers.

Mobile-Friendly App for Streamlined Utility Billing and Secure Payments

ScienceSoft’s talents cooperated with the Client for over 12 months. During this time, the Client got robust utility bill payment functionality and sleek user interfaces tailored to the brand styles of the utility service providers. Team augmentation with ScienceSoft’s paytech talents helped the Client optimize project costs while ensuring the app’s superior quality. Thanks to the mature Agile development practices of our experts, the Client got the opportunity to reduce the product’s time to market.

The Client was satisfied with the results of the cooperation and expressed the desire to work with ScienceSoft on the future evolution of the utility billing app’s payment features.

Technologies and Tools

.NET, .NET Blazor (server and client mode), Azure (Azure Web Apps, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Blob Storage, Azure Event Hub, Azure Durable Functions, Azure Functions, Azure Communication Services for SMS, Azure Pipelines), Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio, Jira, Trello, ClickUp.