I was at the NG ESO webinar earlier for next winters DFS (aka saving sessions) and not surprisingly for next winter the “in day” adjustment is going to be removed completely
. They were asked if they had any evidence of gaming and they did not
, however they had suppliers warning them of the potential for perverse incentives.
There was some gaming by signing up to multiple DFS services and getting away with it as it was up the DFS suppliers to police it and not all did. Also, there was only weekly checks, next winter the proposal is to go to daily checks and only allow the latest sign up if there are duplicates MPANs.
The other change might be to the opting in process. Last time you opted into the scheme and then had to opt in for each individual session. Their reasoning for the session opt in, was they did not want people to be rewarded if they just accidently used less and wanted people to make an active choice. However, if you opted into the session and used more, then your MPAN number was excluded from the calculations. In other words, for a supplier, if half of opted in customers used more and half used less to the same extent, there would be no net savings, but the supplier was still rewarded in full for all the customers using less.
Next time they are considering having a single opting into the scheme and then you will be deemed to have opted into each session automatically unless you opt out of individual sessions. In this case if you don’t opt out, then your MPAN will be included in the calculations so if you use more, you will reduce the saving to everyone else of that supplier. This is either going to mean less payout for people who used less or a penalty to customers who use more.
As last time, it will be up to the suppliers how they incentivise their customers.
