About Arbor
Arbor is the app that lowers your electricity bill without lifting a finger. By analyzing a customer’s utility usage and identifying better supply rates in the market, Arbor automatically switches customers to a lower rate from a vetted supplier, with no service interruptions and no surprises. You pay the same bill, just at a lower rate. Arbor also monitors rates on an ongoing basis, ensuring customers are always getting the best deal available as the market changes. It’s always free, there’s no risk, and customers can cancel anytime. With a customer base in the millions and growing, Arbor is making energy affordability effortless for American households.
The Challenge
Scaling a utility data-dependent product is harder than it looks. Matching a customer to the right rate requires authenticating their utility account and retrieving their billing history quickly, while the customer is still engaged in the signup flow. That means navigating an enormously fragmented landscape: dozens of different utility usage and billing structures, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and security requirements that vary by utility, and frequent website changes. Arbor needed a partner to help handle the hard problems automatically, reliably, and at scale.
Built with Bayou
Bayou’s utility API integrates directly into Arbor’s customer acquisition flow, authenticating utility accounts and returning bill data across all supported utilities in a unified data model. Security is central to Arbor’s promise to its customers, so finding a partner that matched that commitment was critical. Bayou delivered on that front. Customer credentials and data are fully encrypted in transit and at rest, and are protected from access by anyone outside of authorized systems, including Bayou’s own team.
Beyond security, Bayou silently handles every obstacle that would otherwise grind onboarding to a halt: navigating CAPTCHA and bot detection systems, managing MFA flows across dozens of utilities, and adapting automatically when utility websites change.
MFA is one of the biggest barriers in utility data access. In many of Arbor’s critical markets the vast majority of customers have MFA enabled, making these customers effectively unreachable without robust support. Bayou handles MFA seamlessly, allowing Arbor to serve markets that were previously out of reach. Bayou’s MFA support also enables longer data refresh cycles without requiring customers to re-authenticate, keeping utility data current and reducing friction over the long term.
Across tens of thousands of successful authentications, Bayou delivers the speed and reliability essential to Arbor’s business: the median time to authenticate is under 4 seconds and bill retrieval takes less than 15 seconds. Arbor has successfully fetched over 1 million unique utility bills through Bayou, providing the data foundation for accurate, ongoing savings.
Business Impact
42%
of Arbor’s new customers this year required MFA handling that only Bayou could reliably deliver
A Partnership Built on Reliability
Both Arbor and Bayou share a conviction that energy affordability should be effortless for every American household.
“Bayou has been a strong partner for Arbor. Since integrating their API, we’ve seen an improvement in customer onboarding, helping more households reduce their electricity costs. Their platform handles MFA effectively across utilities we support. Their team has been responsive and easy to work with throughout the process.”
— Owen Quinlan, Head of Data, Arbor
“Energy affordability is one of the most pressing household issues in America today. Companies like Arbor are on the front lines of solving it, and they need utility data infrastructure that is instant, reliable, and capable of handling the full complexity of the US utility landscape. That is the problem Bayou was built to solve. We believe every American household deserves clean, affordable and abundant energy, and we’re proud to power the companies making that a reality.”
— James Gordey, CEO & Co-Founder, Bayou Energy
Looking Forward
As Arbor continues expanding into new markets, the complexity of utility data access will only grow. With Bayou managing the full depth of that complexity, Arbor can stay focused on what they set out to do: making energy affordability simple, automatic, and free for every American household.
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