Solving The Last Mile Of One Touch Switch.
One year on from the launch of One Touch Switch, Zentive CEO Dan Shilcock joined an industry panel at Connected Britain 2025 to discuss how providers close the gap on the switches that still don't match.
A year on from the launch of the UK’s One Touch Switch (OTS) process, the people who built it gathered at Connected Britain 2025 to take stock, and to be honest about the work still to do. Zentive, which collaborated with The One Touch Switching Company (TOTSCo) on the technical design of OTS, was part of that conversation.
Speaking on the panel alongside TOTSCo Chief Executive Paul Bradbury, BT Group’s Neena Rupani and Grain Connect’s Richard Fletcher, Zentive CEO Dan Shilcock turned the focus to the switches that still fall through: the roughly one in five requests that don’t match on the first attempt.
The Match-Rate Gap
The TOTSCo Hub has had a strong first year, with millions of switch messages processed and switch volumes climbing steadily since launch. But the match rate, the share of requests that succeed first time, remains the industry’s central challenge. The best-performing providers are reaching around 80%; the panel was candid that 100% is not realistic, and that the unmatched remainder needs a deliberate answer rather than wishful thinking.
As Dan noted, one of the few ways to resolve an unsuccessful switch today is for one provider to contact the other directly. It works, but it isn’t compulsory, and an industry-wide process can’t depend on goodwill alone. Closing that gap, consistently and at scale, is where the next phase of OTS has to focus.
Why It Matters To Us
Zentive has been close to One Touch Switch since its technical design, and our SureSwitch platform now connects providers to the TOTSCo Hub in production. That gives us a direct stake in the questions raised at Connected Britain: not only whether a switch can be made, but whether the experience is dependable enough that both customers and providers trust it every time.
The same thinking now extends to business switching, where Zentive is preparing SureSwitch for the industry’s enterprise (GPLB) process. The commercial and regulatory picture is more complex than the consumer world, but the goal is the same: make switching simple, and compliant, by default.
Read the full coverage of the panel at TelcoTitans.