UNITY Platform
UNITY
Mock copy to be supplied about UNITY and the services it provides.
Case Study – UNITY Platform (MHHS)
What It Is
Unity is C&C Group’s market-proven integration and messaging platform designed to support large-scale, regulated market change programmes such as Market-wide Half Hourly Settlement (MHHS). MHHS represents one of the most significant transformations in the UK energy market since the introduction of competition, requiring a new approach to market-wide communications, resilience, and regulatory compliance.
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C&C Group is the selected partner for approximately 99% of DNO and IDNO MPANs, placing Unity at the centre of MHHS delivery across the UK. Unity operates as a secure
and scalable integration layer between the central Data Integration Platform (DIP) and multiple participant systems, enabling organisations to meet stringent non-functional and regulatory requirements while protecting core operational platforms from disruption.
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Unity enables market participants to send and receive regulated market messages securely and reliably at scale. A self-service graphical interface provides full visibility of message flows, system connections, and operational status across multiple internal environments.
Scalable by Design
Unity is scalable by design, supporting high message volumes, complex routing, and participation by multiple market actors without performance degradation. The platform scales functionally, technically, and operationally as regulatory and market requirements evolve, enabling new message types, participants, and changes to be onboarded quickly and safely.
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Unity supports multiple delivery methods, including push, pull, and secure file transfer, allowing organisations to align integration approaches with their internal technical architectures while maintaining full compliance with market rules.
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The platform is hosted on Microsoft Azure using high-availability configurations across multiple data centres, with replication to a secondary region to meet disaster recovery and resilience obligations. This ensures continuity of service and compliance with mandated recovery time objectives.
E2E Value and Benefits
A core component of the platform is the Unity Message Vault, which provides secure, centralised storage for all market communications. The Vault is designed for environments where auditability, evidential integrity, and data protection are critical.
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All data is encrypted at rest, transferred using mutual TLS, and segregated by customer to ensure confidentiality. Access is controlled through OAuth2/JWT authentication, ensuring only authorised users can retrieve sensitive market data.
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The Message Vault automatically creates a complete, immutable audit trail of all messages sent and received. Comprehensive logging and monitoring support regulatory oversight and provide assurance in the event of disputes, investigations, or compliance reviews.
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This solution provides an scalable architecture capable of overseeing hundreds of millions of messages. By harnessing advanced AI, it offers lightning-fast search capabilities that guarantee precise record location in a fraction of a second.
Strategic Impact
Unity acts as a controlled integration and resilience layer for MHHS, reducing systemic risk by insulating participant systems from direct dependency on the central DIP. This strengthens overall market stability and supports consistent compliance across a highly distributed market landscape.
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C&C Group delivers Unity through a fully managed service model, providing end-to-end responsibility for design, development, operation, and continuous improvement. This allows market participants to focus on core business and regulatory delivery while reducing technical and operational risk associated with complex integration infrastructure.
Outcome for DNOs and IDNOs
For DNOs and IDNOs, Unity provides a secure, compliant, and nationally scalable platform for participation in MHHS. It enables consistent access to regulated market messaging, protects operational systems from disruption, and delivers full auditability aligned to regulatory requirements.
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Key outcomes include market-wide coverage across the vast majority of MPANs, reduced operational burden through managed services, faster onboarding of regulatory changes, and increased confidence in compliance, resilience, and evidential integrity across all market interactions.
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Unity provides DNOs and IDNOs with an immutable record of all data transmitted via the DIP. The user interface enables customers to search millions of records in sub-second timescales, returning full transaction details along with extractable copies of the underlying data.
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This capability is rapidly becoming a critical resource for meeting audit requirements, supporting both external audits and internal assessments of system performance and accuracy.
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The user interface has been designed to be intuitive and easy to use, while also providing powerful tools for advanced users. In-context help is embedded throughout the application, enabling users to quickly resolve queries relating to functionality without external support.