Our project to develop an innovative point-of-sale finance technology solution for residential retrofit decarbonisation has been awarded almost £1.8m in government funding for its 14-month Pilot Phase. This follows an extensive six-month Discovery Phase that ended in October 2023.
With millions of domestic properties requiring energy efficiency upgrades across the country, the point-of-sale finance platform will reduce barriers to funding and support homeowners and residential landlords enhance the energy efficiency of their properties.
POST-FREE (Point-of-Sale Technology for Financing Retrofits & Energy Efficiency) is a collaboration with retrofit decarbonisation consultant Sustainable Energy Services (SES) and fintech Scroll Finance. The government’s Department for Energy Security & Net Zero has enabled the project via the Green Home Finance Accelerator, part of the £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
Valuable insights on the key barriers to retrofit that consumers face today have been gained during the Discovery Phase of the collaboration for which the project received £136k in initial grant funding, with the next stage of the process intending to translate findings into tangible, real-world applications. Research undertaken showed that the most common barriers to prevent homeowners and landlords from pursuing retrofit work were the high upfront cost and inadequate access to suitable finance options, experienced by 78% of participants who took part in the research.
Our chair and owner Derek Horrocks said: “We firmly believe that retrofit energy efficiency and decarbonisation improvements should be accessible to all, without the financial barriers faced by many consumers. As someone involved in the delivery of life-changing retrofit works across the country, the Green Home Finance Accelerator immediately became an opportunity which I believed could make a difference to many people in the private housing sector’
