Impact
Safer
Invisible to the customer
Scalable
Future-proof
Replace the outdated, in-house platform with an industry-standard SaaS solution.
About
Essent is the largest energy provider in the Netherlands. Millions of customers can log in every day—either through the app or via My Essent and My Energiedirect. Behind that simple action lies an organization that is constantly reinventing itself.
In recent years, Essent has consciously shifted its focus: from legacy systems to the cloud, and from just electricity and gas to a broader range of offerings for customers. It is precisely within this growing ecosystem that complexity is also increasing. Charging cards, home batteries, partnerships with third parties that provide insights into energy consumption: every new service requires a new integration. And every integration starts with the same question: Who are you, and what are you authorized to see?
“Jens has really been the linchpin for me, bridging the gap between business and technology—and vice versa—so that I could understand it and make the right decision.”
WHEN LOGGING IN BECOMES INCREASINGLY COMPLEX
Most organizations treat identity and access management as a one-time project: you build it once, and then no one pays it any more attention. At Essent, the opposite turned out to be true. As the ecosystem grew—charging cards, home batteries, third parties looking to access energy data—that same login environment became the layer through which everything had to pass. Not the front door, but the foundation.
And that foundation was not built with growth in mind. Essent had built its own Identity Provider using open source; it functioned well for years, but maintaining security for a custom-built system is not a core task for an energy provider. Furthermore, business logic that didn’t belong there was intertwined with the login environment: customer relationships—such as guardianship or family members accessing each other’s accounts—were linked to the online account rather than to the customer number. It was precisely in these kinds of complex, personal situations that Essent wanted to be certain the system correctly recorded who was acting on whose behalf. “The biggest challenge lay in customers and customer relationships,” says Jens van Waarsenburg, Solutions Architect at Team Rockstars. “Those relationships should be based on the customer number, not the login account. By separating the two, the system will now always know exactly who performed which action.”
It wasn’t a project you could just tackle on the side. Hans Stupers, Product Owner at Essent, knew it had always been one of Essent’s top strategic projects; his predecessor had estimated it would take half a year. It turned into a multi-year process, precisely because every new partnership Essent wanted to enter into ran up against the same question: Could this foundation support the growth?
A SOLUTION THAT THOUGHT ONE STEP AHEAD
Essent chose Auth0 as its new, industry-standard identity provider. Team Rockstars was given an unusual mandate: not just ad-hoc support work, but the complete design of the architecture, roadmap, and migration strategy.
That led to exactly the kind of insight that Essent itself was still in the process of developing. “Rockstars have largely determined how things could turn out,” says Hans. “With their experience, they were often ahead of the decisions Essent was making at the time. That’s what I love about working with an external partner like Team Rockstars IT.”
The core of the solution was decoupling: the identity layer was split into two bounded contexts. One handles customer relationships and business logic, linked to the customer number; the other handles only the login process, linked to the online account. Both communicate via events and commands, completely decoupled, so that a failure in one system does not affect the other. For external partners, such as charging card providers that request access via a token, this means that new integrations will now connect to a system built specifically for that purpose.
The migration itself was carried out using a “lazy migration” approach: the next time a customer logged in, they were automatically transferred to the new system using their existing password, without anyone having to configure anything. The rollout was also carefully timed: first the smaller brand, Energiedirect, then Essent, and deliberately no external communication about the change.
NO NEWS IS THE BEST NEWS
“For me, one of the most important things was always that the customer wouldn’t notice the switch to a new system,” says Hans. That’s exactly what happened.
- No disruption for customers: no significant increase in customer service inquiries on the day of the launch, at both Essent and Energiedirect.
- Smooth launch at Essent: Energiedirect, which was the first to go live, experienced a few technical issues that were resolved that same morning.
- Better visibility for customer service: The customer contact center can now reliably and promptly verify whether an account actually exists, rather than relying on incomplete or conflicting data.
- Greater agility: Integrating new functionality requires listening for an event, not building new connections to existing systems.
Collaboration
“As Rockstars, we often hear: ‘We have this problem—fix it,’” says Jens. “This project was different: we were given an outdated system that needed to be replaced, and we were allowed to design it ourselves.”
That freedom was made possible by trust. “I’m expected to make decisions. I do that with the help of engineers. If I’m surrounded only by quiet engineers, a product might be technically well-built, but it still might not be what we want. That’s where the Rockstars really made a difference,” says Hans. “If I were walking around the floor and no one told me they were part of Team Rockstars, to me they’d just be part of Essent: people who deliver high quality.”
Jens recognizes that culture: “You can tell that Essent really supports you as a person and fosters personal growth. And it really doesn’t matter that you’re an external contractor.” Hans describes the team as rebellious: “They kept searching for the solution and took ownership of it.”
It was precisely that combination—perseverance and responsibility—that transformed an outdated system into a foundation on which Essent can continue to build.
