Post - Blog
How energy retailers can plug the five per cent revenue leak gap
- 16 days ago (2026-05-22)
- Junior Isles
Ruben Van den Bossche , CEO of Gorilla
World Utilities Congress 2026
Retailers understandably spend most of their time focusing on the big events like wholesale spikes or regulatory shifts but, as a result, revenue drops under the radar. This is often driven by poor or misaligned forecasting data across teams that can quietly distort ratios until premiums no longer cover the gap. In the UK, costs like non-commodity charges that are slow to respond to small volume changes, can also be a contributing factor when forecasting assumptions are wrong. Very quickly, small discrepancies can turn into more significant losses.
Price spikes have also sent negative impacts ricocheting across the industry, placing
additional financial strain on suppliers forcing some of them to exit the market altogether. As competition across the wholesale market intensifies, retailers will have to find new sources of competitive advantage, otherwise the once-small mistakes hidden below the surface will start to become a very large pinch point.
Where traditional reporting falls short
For a long time, energy retailers operated in stable conditions. But now, everything has changed. Volatility has become the baseline and a perfect storm of factors means that the headwinds facing retailers in the UK are only intensifying.
Most energy retailers still manage margin using tools and processes designed for a more stable environment but, today, data is fragmented across pricing, trading, billing and finance, and each team operates with a different view of risk and performance. Many current systems are backward-looking, only able to explain what went wrong after value has already leaked away. In the end, no one has a complete picture and what retailers cannot see they cannot control.
The biggest barrier to profitability is internal. The trouble is, while margin management is currently everyone's responsibility, it isn’t one person’s job.
We see this clearly reflected in the data silos that plague even the most sophisticated retailers. Sales, pricing and trading teams often operate with different datasets or different ‘versions of the truth’. Without a unified view, retailers are flying blind, so the goal must be one version of the truth that allows teams to move fast without breaking governance. Retailers have the data but they lack the ability to bring it together to truly understand their margins and start to prioritise margin growth.
Steps for energy retailers regain that five per cent
There are four principles that retailers need to follow to plug the gap. It goes from increasing visibility of their margin, steering their prices accordingly, to protecting their margin, and ultimately growing their business.
It all starts with visibility and giving retailers a real-time understanding of margin at contract level, not just portfolio level. A single, trusted data foundation – unifying cost, risk and validated consumption data – is essential. Forecasted and realised margin should be compared continuously using bottom-up re-costing, so underperforming contracts are exposed before losses spiral. From there, they can empower their commercial teams to price with confidence, ensuring deals are set up to retain value in the long term.
This new approach, known as Energy Margin Intelligence, aligns pricing logic and billing execution, so complex products can be invoiced accurately, which helps stop margin leakage. And rather than waiting for customers to signal dissatisfaction, EMI uses data and AI to anticipate the right product mix needed to retain and grow accounts before trouble arises.
Five per cent of revenue is not an operational rounding error, it is a strategic vulnerability. In a market where volatility is structural and margins are tight, retailers can no longer afford invisible erosion. By confronting the data blind spots at the heart of their organisations and adopting a unified, real-time view of margin, they can shift from reacting to losses to systematically preventing them. The retailers that close this gap will not just protect value, they will outperform.