The identity gap in Dutch energy

No consumer market in the Netherlands is easier to leave than energy. A household can compare the whole market in a few minutes, switch on a price difference and be with a new supplier within a month. In 2025, 15.1% of Dutch households did exactly that, spread across 61 licensed suppliers.

The other sectors in the Identity Maturity Index 2026 report had some brakes against this volatility. Insurance has an annual renewal window and telecom has contract terms and handset subsidies. Energy has neither of those brakes, so suppliers buy their growth instead, and welcome bonuses have become the standard way to do it.

Source: ACM Energiemonitor, January 2026

Add the comparison platform’s commission and the marketing spend that put the offer in front of the household, and every new customer comes with a known, rising, up-front cost. That customer can then leave again on a price change a year later. In this context, two things matter more than anywhere else: how many people who start a registration actually finish it, and how well the supplier knows who it has signed.

The customer nobody verified

A supplier that onboards through a form and a bank account number has a billing relationship, not a verified customer. That difference remains mostly invisible until something goes wrong: a contract signed in someone else’s name, a call centre confirming identity with details anyone can find, a move where nobody can tell whether the person asking is the account holder.

The Identity Maturity Index

In April 2026, itsme asked NielsenIQ to find out how well providers handle identity, from the customer’s perspective. More than 4,000 consumers in Belgium and the Netherlands participated, including 508 Dutch energy customers. For the four moments where a supplier has to know who you are, consumers stated how their supplier handles it today and how important that moment is to them. That resulted in two scores out of 100: maturity (what suppliers actually do) and importance (what customers expect). The distance between them is the gap.

Dutch energy scores 36. It is the only sector-country pair in the Index below 40, and the only one still at the Legacy stage of the maturity model.

Low scores across every touchpoint

Dutch energy scores between 30 and 38 at all four touchpoints, so no part of the journey stands out as a strength. And the two weakest scores sit at the two moments that decide whether a customer is properly acquired and properly kept: signing the contract and logging in to the app.

When asked what should be standard practice for confirming a new customer’s identity, Dutch energy customers name an external ID app first, well ahead of every manual alternative. Belgian energy customers say the same at 51%. In both countries the runner-up is a manual fallback, an online form. Nobody picked username and password or a video selfie.

The biggest barrier to sign-up

Product teams often assume customers will push back on stronger verification, like an external identity app. The data says the opposite. Of every method tested, the two involving an ID app are the least likely to cost a supplier the customer. The video selfie is the biggest barrier in the entire study, and the energy sector uses it more often than any of the other three sectors measured.

Share of consumers who say this requirement would stop them becoming a new customer, across all four sectors and both countries. Source: Identity Maturity Index 2026.

For a supplier paying up to €688 per new household in bonuses alone, a video selfie at registration is a costly choice: 64% of consumers say it would stop them signing up.

Put that next to the revolving door. A supplier commits up to €688 in bonus, plus platform commission, plus marketing, to bring a household to its registration flow, and then asks that household to do the one thing 64% of consumers say would make them walk away.

The two markets sell a near-identical product to near-identical customers. But one has partly deployed a reusable identity layer and the other has not. The result: Belgian energy scores 54 on maturity against the Dutch 36, an 18-point difference that is the largest cross-country gap in the entire Index.

Source: Identity Maturity Index 2026. Energy BE and Energy NL.

Most of Belgium’s lead comes from login. At confirming identity and signing a contract, Belgium scores just 39 and 41. So Belgium is not a story about a mature sector. It is a story about one touchpoint, done properly, by part of the market. Where a reusable identity method is deployed, the score at that touchpoint roughly doubles: Dutch web login scores 38 for the same reason Belgian web login scores 71.

But there is also a second, less comfortable lesson from this data. When a strong method is offered next to username and password, plenty of customers take the familiar option and the score settles in the middle. That is why Belgian web login lands at 71 rather than 90. What separates a mature identity stack from an immature one is not which methods a supplier offers, but whether the strongest one is the default way in.

On 1 January 2026, the Energiewet replaced the Elektriciteitswet 1998 and the Gaswet, and with them the rules on energy contracts, switching and termination. Its effect on identity is indirect, but substantial.

This is not four separate touchpoint problems waiting for four separate fixes. Adding verification at registration while login stays on a password, or strengthening login while contracts are still signed by emailed PDF, improves one number but leaves the patchwork underneath. What will actually improve the score is one trusted identity layer that allows users to verify, log in and sign at every point in the customer journey.

The timing favours whoever moves first. By the end of 2026, every EU member state must offer a digital identity wallet at eIDAS Level of Assurance High. Public services and banking go first, with energy behind them. For now, reusable identity in Dutch energy is a competitive choice rather than a compliance obligation, but it won’t stay that way.

itsme is now available to every Dutch energy supplier, operating in the Netherlands since June 2026 at the level the EU Digital Identity Wallet will require. It covers identity checks at registration, passwordless login on web and app, qualified e-signatures for contracts and renewals, and transaction confirmation, all on the systems you already have. You can go live one touchpoint at a time, so there’s no full rebuild and you set the pace.