Q&A: Sue Amies-King, chief executive, Water Plus

Chief executive of Water Plus – the newly-formed joint venture (JV) between Severn Trent and United Utilities – speaks to Utility Week about how the company will compete in the new retail market, future plans for growth, and the creation of a new brand.

Q: What are the next steps, now that the JV has been approved?

A: The next steps are to create the legal entity – Water Plus. Well, we’ve got the legal entity, but we will legally incorporate the business on 1 June, and then it will become a JV.

We’ve got quite advanced plans in terms of the integration and the set-up. We have a big project team in Stoke already, and we’re now implementing those plans in a way that is seamless for our customers as we move towards being completely set up in Stoke.

Q: Where did the idea for the name – Water Plus – come from?

A: There was a long list of names and we researched it amongst customers – both in-area and outside the area. We feel it does what it says on the tin, it’s straightforward and simple, which is just the kind of business we’re creating, but also it implies that there’s more on offer from the new business – and we like that aspect because that’s definitely our intention.

Q: How does Water Plus plan to differentiate itself in the market?

A: First of all, because we’ll be completely separate, and we’ll be building this business from scratch, we’ll be designing it with the customer in mind right from the start. We aim to be agile and innovative and bring in fresh new ideas from the new people who will be joining us as well as the experienced people that we’ll be bringing with us.

One of the things will be pace and agility – because we’ll be all set up separately with cloud-based systems, so we can make changes and deliver new offerings to customers we think much faster than the competition. That’s how we’re setting it up, so that we can do that.

Of course it’s not a one-size-fits-all, for our SME and micro customers we’re looking to deliver a full digital offering – a self-service, very extensive offering – so that we can help save them time and money.

For the larger customer, as well as the basics like accurate billing, we’ll be delivering management solutions such as contingency planning and water reduction strategies, and we’ll be developing ‘Portfolio Plus’, as we call it, which is all about helping large, multi-site customers to manage their whole portfolio of sites, and benchmark one site against another.

Q: Water Plus already has 25 per cent market share – what are your plans for growth?

A: We’ll be quite busy for the next 12 months setting up and integrating the organisation, but we do plan to be a winner in the market and we certainly want to be market-leading on service and on our people engagement. We have ambitions for growth and we want to be successful, we want to be seen as a go-to company for business customers.

Q: Do you have any concerns over the retail margin?

A: I wouldn’t say I have concerns. The retail margin, at the level it is at, was actually one of the reasons behind the JV. If you’ve got margins like that then the best thing to do is to look for synergies with another player and have a level of scale so that when you are investing – and clearly both the companies need to invest in order to be fit to compete – then you’re doing it once rather than twice. That’s actually the rationale behind the JV.

Q: Do you have any further plans for the brand?

A: Yes, we have, we’ve got lots of plans. We will, over the next three or four weeks, be developing the logo and the brand identity and so on, and we can’t wait to reveal that once it’s ready.

Q: Would Severn Trent and United Utilities consider working together if domestic retail were to happen?

A: We’ve no plans to look at domestic retail, the joint venture is purely B2B. There’s a consultation underway on domestic and that’s not been concluded, so our focus is very much on the B2B market and that’s more than enough to focus on for the foreseeable future.