OVO Energy customers can ‘cut energy bills for good’ with HSBC offer | Personal Finance | Finance

OVO Energy customers can get funding to help “cut energy bills for good” thanks to a new HSBC offer.

The energy supplier has said customers will be able to borrow money from HSBC to pay for solar panels and batteries under a new scheme to boost take-up of low-emission home upgrades.

The offer means its four million customers won’t need to have a HSBC account to access funds to install green energy devices to make their homes more efficient, and will be able to use the bank’s Flexipay lending product to cover the cost of heat pumps and electric vehicle charges in the future.

OVO chief executive David Buttress said the move will help people to adopt greener technologies which “will cut energy bills for good”.

It comes after the government last week announced a £30 million cash injection to the Boiler Upgrade Scheme to make it easier for people to install a heat pump. The government scheme allows UK households to get £7,500 off the cost of a heat pump to help thousands benefit from cheaper energy bills.

Heat pumps are currently much more expensive to buy and install than a conventional boiler but are significantly more energy efficient and can be cheaper to run, so they can save households hundreds of pounds a year compared to a gas boiler.

Andrew Rankin, interim head of unsecured lending at HSBC UK, said the coming decade will bring a “significant acceleration” in people investing to make their homes more energy efficient, by measures such as installing heat pumps and solar panels.

He added that instalment-led lending is becoming increasingly popular among consumers to pay for goods and “can be a great budgeting tool, providing the certainty of fixed repayments and a set end date”.

He said: “We are excited to support consumers through a fully regulated journey aimed at delivering great customer outcomes. We will enable this through key, select merchant partnerships of which Ovo is the first.”

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