By NEFISHETU YAKUBU

The Management of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company Plc. (BEDC) says it has employed 11 aggregators, 10,000 billing and payment agents to serve customers across Edo, Delta, Ondo State and Ekiti.

BEDC’s Managing Director Henry Ajagbawa made this known during an interactive session with the billing and payment partners in Benin on Monday.

Ajagbawa said that the engagement of billing, payment aggregators and agents was to ensure a seamless vending and payment platforms across BEDC’s franchise states.

“One of the pivot of BEDC is the ability to bill our customers after we have provided our services and ability to collect funds after we have billed our customers.

“The challenges we face when we came into office was that we had just one aggregator and about 1,650 billing and payment agents.

“Most customers complained that they are unable to pay their bills because they cannot find agents to pay through.

“Our operations span to rural and urban areas in four states and there are no agents in most of our operations areas,” he said.

The BEDC’s boss said the best way to serve customers would be to create a convenient platform for them to be able to track down an agent within the proximity of the areas they live.

“What we did is to break the monopoly of one aggregator that we met on ground.

”We, therefore, appointed 11 aggregators who will come with more than 10,000 agents to serve customers across BEDC’s franchise states,” he said.

Ajagbawa further said that the company had concluded plans to reconnect communities that were disconnected from the national grid.

”We have told ourselves that we will push electricity to the rural areas and in doing so, we are going to engage with them on how to pay through our agency expansion programme,” he said.

The managing director added that the company had also introduced a revenue assurance platform that would monitor the aggregators to ensure integrity in the process. (NAN)

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