enabling operators to accelerate growth, monetise 5G, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

December 3, 2025 – Hansen Technologies (ASX:HSN), a leading global provider of software and services to the communications & media and energy & utilities industries, today announced that its Hansen CCB All-in-One Digital BSS solution has been named a 2025 Fast Mode Awards winner. Hansen has taken home the ‘Digital BSS Trailblazer Award for Impact’ at The Fast Mode Awards 2025. This award honours Business Support Systems that redefine how telecom operators manage customer lifecycles, product offerings, and revenue streams with agility and precision.

The Digital BSS Trailblazer category celebrates solutions that embrace cloud-native, API-driven architectures, modular microservices, and no-code/low-code configurability – capabilities that are essential for operators to thrive in the era of 5G, IoT, and digital convergence. Hansen CCB stood out for its ability to deliver a unified digital backbone that accelerates innovation and simplifies complexity.

Why Hansen CCB leads the way:

• Cloud-native, AI and API-powered architecture for scalability and future readiness
• Unified product catalog and no-code configuration enabling rapid product launches in days, not months
• TM Forum Open API Gold Certification, ensuring interoperability and ecosystem integration
• Proven outcomes: reduced time-to-market, improved service agility, and optimised total cost of ownership

Scott Weir, President Communications & Media, Hansen Technologies commented: “Winning this award reinforces our commitment to helping telecom operators accelerate growth with a unified digital backbone. With everything integrated, it reduces complexity, speeds up delivery, and unlocks new revenue streams without the overhead, all delivered with trusted, world-class customer care.”

Hansen CCB Delivering Real Impact

Operators worldwide have leveraged Hansen CCB to consolidate legacy systems, streamline operations, and unlock new monetisation opportunities. From enabling multi-brand, multi-country deployments to supporting bundled offerings across fixed and mobile broadband, pay-TV, OTT, and SaaS. Hansen CCB empowers some of the world’s leading Communications Service Providers to deliver seamless experiences and capture new markets quickly and at scale.

Congratulations to fellow nominees and, of course, all winners at the 2025 The Fast Mode Awards.

-ENDS-

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Transaction Highlights

• Acquisition: 100% of Digitalk Group Holdings Ltd.
• Purchase Price: Enterprise value of £33.1 million (circa A$66.4 million), subject to customary completion adjustments, to be funded through a combination of existing cash reserves and debt.
• Strategic Rationale: Digitalk serves approximately 150 customers across more than 30 countries with solutions that are highly complementary to Hansen’s Global Communications Suite, enabling integration and unlocking cross-sell opportunities.
• Financial Impact: The transaction is expected to be immediately accretive to Adjusted Earnings Per Share (EPSa) [1], supported by strong recurring revenue and profitability.
• Completion Timeline: Expected to be completed by the end of the 2025 calendar year, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

About Digitalk

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in the UK, Digitalk provides mission-critical platforms for mobile and carrier-grade communication operators. Its flagship offering is a full-stack MVNO-in-a-box platform comprising Billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Online Charging System (OCS), Provisioning, and Interactive Voice Response (IVR), that enables Communication Service Providers (CSPs) to launch, operate, scale, and monetise MVNO and sub-brand services rapidly and efficiently.

Digitalk also offers a cloud-based wholesale voice trading platform, including routing, billing, fraud prevention, and monitoring, for international mobile carriers and wholesale service providers.

Digitalk is a historically profitable and cash-generative business. The company employs a team of approximately 60 staff, primarily based in the UK, and supports approximately 150 customers across more than 30 countries. For the financial year ending June 2025 (FY25), Digitalk reported unaudited revenue of approximately £10.5m (over 90% recurring) and Cash EBITDA [2] of £3.3m, reflecting an acquisition multiple of approximately 10x enterprise value to Cash EBITDA.

Strategic Rationale

The acquisition of Digitalk is highly complementary and strongly aligned with Hansen’s strategy to expand its global leadership in the communications and media industry. Key benefits include:

• Ownership of best in breed MVNO software: Digitalk’s globally scalable MVNO and carrier-grade applications are highly complementary to Hansen’s existing Global Communications Suite.
• Immediate earnings accretion: The transaction is expected to be immediately earnings accretive, supported by recurring high-margin Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue.
• Expansion into high-growth segments: Digitalk’s MVNO platform enables Hansen to serve digital-first MVNOs and sub-brands leveraging rapid deployment and scalability.
• Blue chip customer base: Digitalk is a top tier provider of MVNO solutions, with deep integrations and longstanding partnerships with global CSPs.
• Cross-Sell and upsell opportunities: Hansen will be able to offer Digitalk’s solutions to its existing customer base, leveraging its global sales capability and standards.
• Global reach and resilience: Digitalk’s international footprint and blue-chip customers enhance Hansen’s geographic and customer diversity.

Deal Structure and Funding

The acquisition will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Hansen Technologies Limited. The purchase price will be funded through a combination of cash and debt. Completion of the acquisition is expected to occur before the end of the 2025 calendar year, subject to regulatory approvals and other standard closing conditions.

Hansen’s Global Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Andrew Hansen, said:

“Digitalk is a highly complementary acquisition for Hansen – technologically, commercially, and culturally. It expands our recurring revenue base and unlocks new growth avenues in MVNOs and wholesale voice. We’re very excited to welcome the Digitalk team and accelerate value creation for our combined customers and stakeholders. We look forward to discussing this acquisition in more detail at our upcoming Annual General Meeting on 20th November 2025.”

A brief conference call to discuss the acquisition was held on 5 November 2025. Click here to access the recording.

This announcement is authorised by the Board.

For further information: Investor and analyst enquiries

Peter Beamsley
Head of Investor Relations and Sustainability
+61 438 799 631
Investor.Relations@hansencx.com

About Hansen
Hansen Technologies (ASX: HSN) is a leading global provider of software and services to the Energy & Utilities and Communications & Media industries. With its award-winning software portfolio, Hansen serves companies with customers in over 80 countries, helping them to create, sell, and deliver new products and services, manage and analyse customer data, and control critical revenue management and customer support processes.

For more information, visit www.hansencx.com

[1] Adjusted Earnings Per Share (EPSa) refers to the Company’s net profit attributable to shareholders, adjusted for significant non-recurring items, divided by the weighted average number of shares outstanding.

[2] Cash EBITDA is EBITDA excluding capitalised development costs.

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Editors Note – this opinion piece was first published on The Fast Mode and is republished here with their permission.

Across the globe, there’s a huge push underway to expand broadband and fibre infrastructure. Governments, investors, and communication service providers (CSPs) are spending tens of billions & doubling down on the rollout of high-speed networks to meet growing demand for always-on connectivity. But as the industry accelerates fibre deployment and scales broadband access, CSPs are facing a new challenge: managing the commercial complexity that comes with it. With the investment focus on build-out of networks, the systems underpinning customer growth are often an afterthought.

From provisioning fibre connections – which are inherently more complex than traditional networks – to creating and delivering personalised bundles that integrate a myriad of own and partner sourced products and services, today’s CSPs are grappling with a more intricate landscape. This new environment requires more than just network investments. It calls for a modern approach to business operations – especially in bringing commercial agility to how services are launched, monetised, and managed, along with a customer experience that reduces friction from sales to self-service.

Enter: The Need for a Modern BSS

Legacy business support systems (BSS) were built for simpler times (think landlines and dial-up). They weren’t designed to keep pace with the rapid evolution of broadband services, fibre infrastructure, or the digital experiences customers now expect. The result? Many CSPs are finding that their existing BSS can’t support the level of agility and scalability the market now demands, driving customer churn and margin erosion.

Many CSPs are facing increasing operational costs while facing challenges from OTT players who build innovative products and services. With the right solution, these challenges can become partnering opportunities to augment existing bundled products to create greater customer value, in turn driving longer customer lifetime value for a CSP.

And it’s not just about network complexity. Industry consolidation – where CSPs are acquiring or merging with fibre and broadband companies – is adding another layer of operational challenge. Understanding what assets have been acquired, how to unify operations, and how to integrate and monetise the combined business effectively all require a next-generation BSS solution that’s flexible, integrated, and ready to scale.

The Smarter Way Forward: Agile, Scalable BSS “In-a-Box”

What CSPs truly require to face these challenges is a Cloud Native turnkey digital BSS solution that is purpose-built for today’s broadband acceleration era. They need solutions that avoid the massive, expensive, and time-consuming transformation projects of the past – and instead, offer a low-friction, modular approach that reduces complexity and delivers results fast. This allows them to reach value in a shorter timeframe & achieve greater autonomy in how they bring new product offerings to market.

As CSPs invest in fibre rollouts and expand broadband access, now is the time to modernise your BSS and really hone your commercial agility to realise the investment in infrastructure.

The post Broadband Boom Brings Complexity: Why It’s Time to Rethink Your BSS appeared first on Hansen Technologies.

As part of this process, Hansen Germany has made updates to powercloud, one of our Hansen CIS products that is optimised for energy customers in Germany and the wider DACH region – so that our customers can smoothly comply with these new regulations and concentrate on their day-to-day business.

Following the far-reaching adjustments of the last format change (‘FUM’) last June – in particular the 24-hour supplier change – the upcoming format changeover are by comparison far more compact. Yet, there is a key and innovative update that has great potential for end customers and the sector as a whole.

New process: ‘Change of technology at locations’

Until October 1, end customers with analogue meters who have been interested in dynamic tariffs had to take action themselves and initiate the conversion with the metering point operator – a process that many were unfamiliar with, creating unnecessary barriers and making it difficult to switch to a dynamic tariff.

With the new process, end customers will be able to request technical changes directly from their energy provider in future . This not only simplifies communication, but also opens up new possibilities in tariff selection – regardless of the existing technology. An important step towards greater flexibility and customer orientation.

We are excited to see how this process will be received – and our hope is that it will have a positive impact on the smart meter rollout rate in Germany.

Despite the short implementation time: highly automated with powercloud

This time, the time span between the format changes was less than four months – and in parallel, follow-up work from FUM 06/2025 was still ongoing, particularly with regard to the 24-hour supplier change. Nevertheless, all the necessary market messages, check logics and process steps (from enquiry to billing) were implemented in Hansen’s powercloud in a highly automated manner.

As an established provider in the German energy market, we continue to focus on proven quality and reliability. Our solutions are developed in close consultation with our customers and partners, whose feedback has been instrumental in shaping the process design.

Everything already rolled out – ready for the “FUM switch”

The necessary adjustments for the 10/2025 format change are already in the production code of the powercloud and will be activated via the FUM switch on the day of the changeover. Hansen Germany is once again setting standards in the efficient implementation of regulatory requirements.

The post Hansen’s powercloud ready for Format change on 1 October 2025 appeared first on Hansen Technologies.

With customer expectations soaring, contact centres struggle to deliver seamless, round-the-clock support across multiple channels. Surging call volumes, escalating service demands, and the necessity for after-hours support present formidable hurdles to maintaining service quality.

Agents must now handle more complex queries; achieving first-call resolution is harder, driving up operational costs. Meeting service expectations becomes challenging without the right tools, impacting customer satisfaction and agent performance.

High-pressure environments contribute to burnout and staff turnover, making recruitment and training costly and time-consuming. Lengthy onboarding processes and inconsistent service quality further complicate operations, leading to inefficiencies and customer frustration.

Legacy systems often cannot keep up with evolving business needs, lacking the integration and flexibility required for modern customer engagement. However, adopting advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), presents a promising solution. Businesses striving to remain competitive are turning to AI to boost efficiency, enhance agent support, and create seamless customer experiences. This transition to AI heralds a promising future for customer service in the energy and utilities sector.

The Shortcomings of First-Generation Chatbots

The emergence of chatbots was expected to revolutionise customer service by offering instant, automated support. However, early-generation chatbots often failed to meet expectations, leading to user frustration and a lack of significant improvements. These limitations underscore the need for more advanced and intelligent solutions to foster a more natural interaction and, ultimately, satisfy the customer’s needs. AI steps into this gap, offering the potential to overcome these limitations and deliver a more effective customer service experience.

Robotic and Unnatural Interactions

First-generation chatbots could not engage in human-like conversations. Their responses were often mechanical, missing the emotional intelligence needed to build customer rapport. They frequently misinterpreted queries without understanding context or nuance, leading to irrelevant or unhelpful responses.

Rigid and Linear Conversations

Early implementations followed pre-defined scripts with little flexibility. They struggled to handle deviations from expected inputs, forcing users to restart interactions if they strayed from the structured path. This rigidity made conversations unnatural and often frustrated customers when they couldn’t get the needed answers.

Limited to Basic Use Cases

Early chatbots could only handle simple, repetitive tasks such as answering basic FAQs, perhaps extending to checking account balances and resetting passwords; when faced with complex, multi-step inquiries, they often fail, requiring customers to escalate their issues to human agents, ultimately defeating the purpose of automation.

No Cross-Use Case Memory

A significant drawback of early chatbot implementations was their inability to retain or transfer information across different channels or interactions. Forcing customers to repeat their details every time they engage with the bot leads to inefficient and frustrating experiences. Without continuity, these chatbots failed to create the seamless, connected service customers expect today.

Lack of Personalisation

First-generation bots operated with a one-size-fits-all approach, offering generic responses that lacked personal relevance; they were deployed as hammers, viewing every situation as a nail. They did not consider customer history, preferences, or past interactions, making conversations feel impersonal and transactional rather than helpful and engaging.

Integration Challenges

With many poorly connected to backend systems, these chatbots could not pull in real-time data or execute actions effectively. This lack of integration led to incomplete or inaccurate responses, forcing customers to switch to other channels for assistance.

The Need for a Smarter Approach

To truly transform customer service, chatbots must evolve beyond the limitations of early implementations. The next generation of conversational systems must offer dynamic, context-aware interactions, integrate seamlessly with enterprise systems, and personalise responses based on individual customer journeys. By addressing these challenges, businesses can create intelligent, responsive, and human-like digital assistants that enhance – not hinder – the customer experience. The urgency of this need for a quantum leap in capabilities is why organisations are considering AI-driven solutions.

The But: The EU’s AI Act and its Implications for AI-driven Customer Engagement in Europe

As AI becomes increasingly integrated into customer engagement strategies, organisations in the energy and utilities sector must navigate new regulatory landscapes, particularly with the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act. This pioneering legislation aims to ensure the ethical deployment of AI, balancing innovation with compliance, data protection, and customer trust. The AI Act creates significant implications for AI-driven customer engagement in Europe, including usage within the energy and utilities sector. It introduces new regulatory requirements and oversight for AI applications, such as the need for transparency and user consent, which will impact the design and implementation of AI-driven customer service solutions.

The AI Act uses a risk-based regulatory framework to govern AI applications across various industries, including energy and utilities. This framework classifies AI systems into four distinct risk categories – unacceptable, High, Limited, and minimal – each with different levels of regulatory oversight. For instance, AI systems used for social scoring or manipulating human behaviour are strictly prohibited, falling under the ‘unacceptable’ risk category. AI systems classified as ‘High-risk’ are subject to stringent regulatory requirements, as they could play an essential role in critical infrastructure, employment decisions, credit scoring, and other sensitive domains. Understanding this framework is crucial for ensuring that AI applications are used responsibly and ethically, explicitly targeting high-risk applications that could threaten fundamental rights and freedoms.

The AI Act’s regulatory focus is on transparency for AI applications falling under the limited risk category. This classification typically applies to AI-driven customer service solutions, such as chatbots, where organisations must inform users that they are interacting with AI and provide appropriate disclosures regarding its functionality. The AI Act requires that users be aware of when they interact with AI and understand the capabilities and limitations of the AI system they are engaging with. This transparency is crucial for building and maintaining customer trust in AI-driven solutions.

The drive for automation in the energy and utilities sector is not new; it’s leveraged increasingly for customer support, demand forecasting, billing automation, and energy efficiency recommendations. While these innovations improve customer experience and operational efficiency, they introduce new compliance challenges under the AI Act and have considerable privacy considerations.

GDPR Compliance & Privacy Protections

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) remains the foundation of data governance in the EU, and AI-driven customer engagement solutions must align with its core principles. Organisations must ensure that customers provide informed consent when AI systems process their personal data. This legislation is not just a recommendation but a necessity. Transparency is key, as users have the right to understand how AI-driven decisions are made, including dynamic pricing models, automated customer support, or energy efficiency recommendations. The gravity of GDPR compliance cannot be overstated, as it is crucial for building and maintaining customer trust in AI-driven solutions.

Additionally, GDPR grants individuals control over their personal data. Customers have the right to access, rectify, delete, or restrict the use of their data when processed by AI systems. Companies must also prioritise fairness and avoid bias in AI decision-making. AI-based pricing models, for example, must not discriminate against specific customer segments, ensuring equitable access to energy services. Non-compliance with these GDPR requirements can lead to substantial fines and reputational damage, reinforcing the need for strict adherence to data protection standards.

Data Sovereignty & Retention

Under the AI Act, data sovereignty principles ensure customer data is processed and retained within appropriate jurisdictional boundaries. Organisations must store personally identifiable information (PII) within the EU or in jurisdictions that provide equivalent data protection. Furthermore, AI-driven customer engagement solutions should follow the principle of data minimisation, collecting only the necessary information required for AI functionalities while avoiding excessive data accumulation.

Companies should implement well-defined retention policies to align with GDPR’s storage limitation principle, ensuring that AI models do not indefinitely store customer interactions. Instead, organisations must define specific timeframes for data storage, after which data should either be deleted or anonymised. Automated techniques can further enhance data privacy by ensuring that personal identifiers are removed or anonymised, thereby reducing the risk of identity exposure.

Data Sharing & Third-Party Risks

As AI adoption grows, many energy and utility companies rely on third-party vendors, cloud-based AI models, or external data sources to power their AI-driven solutions. However, the AI Act introduces stricter obligations regarding sharing customer data with these third parties. Companies must establish robust data processing agreements that ensure AI vendors comply with EU data protection laws and regulatory frameworks.

To maintain compliance, organisations must prohibit the unauthorised sharing of PII with external AI models unless customers explicitly consent to such data usage. Additionally, the AI Act emphasises AI supply chain accountability, meaning organisations using third-party AI solutions must conduct thorough due diligence on their vendors. This requirement includes evaluating security protocols, assessing risks of data leaks, and ensuring that AI providers meet ethical and legal standards. These requirements are particularly relevant for automated energy management solutions that rely on predictive analytics, where customer data must remain protected and used solely for its intended purpose.

AI Ethics & Transparency in Customer Interactions

Transparency is a fundamental pillar of the AI Act, particularly for AI-driven customer engagement solutions. Energy and utility companies must disclose AI usage in customer interactions, ensuring they proactively advise when users interact with AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, or automated decision-making systems. This transparency fosters trust and enables customers to make informed decisions about their usage and interactions with AI technologies.

In addition to transparency, high-risk AI applications – such as those affecting billing, energy access, or contract approvals – must include mechanisms for human oversight. Customers should always be able to escalate AI-driven decisions to a human representative when necessary. Furthermore, AI models used in customer engagement must avoid manipulative practices, ensuring they do not exploit consumer vulnerabilities or nudge users toward behaviours that may not be in their best interest. For example, AI-powered recommendations should promote energy efficiency rather than incentivise excessive consumption.

Sector-Specific Impacts for Energy & Utilities Providers

Understandably, the energy and utilities sector is evaluating the potential for AI in applications beyond customer engagement, including demand forecasting, grid optimisation, fraud detection, and smart metering. While these innovations enhance efficiency, they also introduce regulatory considerations under the AI Act. For example, AI-driven personalised energy pricing models must ensure fairness, preventing discriminatory rates based on customer profiling. Similarly, automated billing and AI-powered customer support systems must include safeguards allowing customers to request human assistance.

Likewise, AI-based fraud detection and anomaly detection solutions must be designed with non-discrimination principles, ensuring that surveillance mechanisms do not unfairly target specific demographics or communities. If AI-driven applications significantly impact consumers’ financial standing or energy access, they may be classified as high-risk under the AI Act, triggering additional compliance obligations.

More generally, predictive maintenance and AI-driven grid management also require careful consideration. While AI can improve infrastructure reliability, it must not compromise data security or result in unfair prioritisation of service availability.

How Organisations Can Prepare

While continuing to innovate, energy and utility companies must take proactive steps toward compliance to navigate these evolving regulatory requirements. AI impact assessments are essential to determine whether solutions fall under high-risk or limited-risk classifications. Strengthening data governance policies ensures that AI applications align with GDPR and AI Act standards, particularly concerning data minimisation and transparency.

Engaging with regulatory authorities and industry bodies can help organisations stay ahead of legislative changes and adapt their AI strategies accordingly. Internal AI ethics frameworks can further support responsible development, ensuring fairness, explainability, and security in AI-driven customer engagement solutions; additionally, enhancing customer communication and transparency by educating users about AI processes and their rights fosters trust and compliance.

Finally, companies must exercise caution when selecting AI vendors, ensuring third-party providers comply with the EU’s AI governance frameworks and maintain robust data protection measures. By taking these proactive steps, energy and utility companies can embrace AI innovation while maintaining compliance with evolving regulatory landscapes.

Conclusion

This article introduces the EU AI Act and discusses the challenges and opportunities for AI-driven customer engagement in the energy and utilities sector.

Organisations can build customer trust by proactively addressing compliance, privacy, and ethical considerations while harnessing AI’s full potential for service innovation and operational efficiency. With a well-structured approach to AI governance, energy and utility companies can leverage AI to enhance customer interactions, streamline operations, and uphold the highest data protection and transparency standards.

Now, safe in the knowledge that AI is a viable and valuable alternative, organisations can plan a path forward. In my next article, I’ll introduce you to Hansen’s scalable and cost-effective AI-powered contact centre solution that empowers businesses to elevate customer experiences, streamline operations, and drive long-term efficiency by combining industry-specific training, omnichannel support, and seamless integration.

Don’t hesitate to contact us to learn more about Hansen’s regionally optimised customer billing and engagement solutions for the energy and utilities market.

Lina is the Product Director for Hansen CIS in the Nordics and leverages over 15 years of experience in the energy industry; she drives innovative software solutions for market participants across the energy value chain.

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Reference and Further Reading:

EU framework: The Artificial Intelligence Act – Privacy Rules

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