Episode 5 - ETRM Mini-Series with CTRM Cubed

Chris Sass and Martin Hiller (Hosts of the ETRM Mini-Series) are talking to Simon Piercy (Managing Director) of CTRM Cubed.

"CTRM Cubed’s TradeCube platform is an innovative, cloud-native E/CTRM service, designed for rapid deployment, simple API integration, self-service management, unparalleled reliability and a first-class user experience. TradeCube operates a genuine SaaS model where you only pay for what you use."

To get more insights about all the vendors that participated in the ETRM Mini-Series, check out https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/energy-podcast-education/etrm/

If you want to find out more about CTRM Cubed click https://insidersguidetoenergy.com/energy-podcast-education/etrm/ctrm-cubed/

Transcript

 | Timestamp | Speaker | Transcript

 | 01:45.32 | chrissass | welcome to insider's guide to energy. Educational series on e t m today martin and I are go to talk to our guests about e t m systems if you've just joined this series. Every episode is an individual I'm gonna start again guys Sorry I apologize welcome to insider's guide to energy. In fuck I'm having a moment welcome to insider's guide to energy educational series this eter I educational series will take you through the e year I vendors in the ecosystems to help you decide. What's best for your environment Martin hiller and myself chris sass will host these sessions. Each session will be consistent so you can listen to all our episodes and compare vendors for yourself. Martin welcome to the program.
| 02:47.42 | Martin | Hi Hi Chris Hi ziman.
| 02:52.79 | chrissass | Today's guest we have with us is from ctm cubed simon pearcy simon welcome to the show. So the way this is going to work for our audience and for you as well is we are going to ask you a number of questions about the industry. What's happening ina chairman today.
| 02:57.66 | Simon Piercy | Thanks for having me chris.
| 03:09.81 | chrissass | About your solution and then we're going to ask some very specific questions finally ending up in a speed round of 10 questions which will ask all the vendors in the industry so that our audience can judge themselves and evaluate each system so to start with why don't we start Broad simon and first tell us about your company. Company's name and a little bit of history on your company before we go into the show.
| 03:31.60 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so just to give you a bit of background about myself. So um I guess I'm a technologist at hard I I graduated in computer science many many years ago kind of ended up. A little bit by accident in the energy sector as a lot of people do end up. Um I don't think it's anything that anybody plans to do um but around about 25 years ago now I joined 1 of the bigger energy companies in the uk. Primarily working as ah as a technology. It's actually started off as a computer programmer all those years ago and kind of from that fell into energy and then very quickly after that I I fell into trading I was involved in putting in some of the. Very early trading systems and I did that for about ten years and at the end of that 10 years I kind of said to myself. Well you know what? we've been working with these systems for um, a number of years and you always think you can do a better job yourself. So somewhat bravely. Um I decided that I was going to set up my own technology company to develop develop software and systems for this sector. Um I ended up running that company for ten years and as much fun as it was um, you know i. Ah, came to a natural conclusion now and I decided that having had the fun of doing that first time round you know I would actually go go ahead and and and have another and have another go at it. So I kind of guess around about 4 years ago now. Myself and some industry colleagues. We set up ctrm cubed and the real kind of driver behind it as I say I'm a technologist was to try and fix some of the problems that kind of beset the the etrm software market. Um. And really just come up with primarily technology solutions to that. Um, we've also had the benefits of over the years um those technologies that kind of things like cloud technologies and better ways of doing software. Um. Come to the fore. So really, the company is about solving issues in the commodity trading sector. That's principally what we're all about.
| 06:07.13 | chrissass | so so I appreciate the introduction. It's great to hear your story I've known you for a little while but I hadn't known your full background. Um, 1 of the things that that. That I think of when I think of you is you get to do a do over right? So you actually worked in e your m in the past you've you've worked in software and understand it and so maybe that leads to an opening you know for the show is a little bit of. So you you said you're solving each year m problems what's wrong with E Year m today or is there anything wrong with eremp today. Why do we need people to start companies up to change things.
| 06:41.49 | Simon Piercy | Yes, exactly so the answer is. There's an awful lot of things that are wrong with etrm. Um today you know and and I guess it like a lot of these things it depends on what perspective that that you come from. But ultimately these platforms are trying to solve an awful lot of um. Trying to solve an awful lot of problems themselves and 1 of the ramifications of that is that you end up with a sector that has become very complex. Um, the nature of the um. The nature of these types of systems is that you're trying to solve problems for a wide range of different companies. But ultimately you ideally just want 1 system to to be able to do that. Um, and what tends to happen over time is you Bob more and more things into these platforms into these systems. And then you have all the problems that that come with that. So um, we tend to kind of refer to kind of incumbent systems as kind of monolithic if you like so these have sprouted from systems that may have been. Evolved from the nineteen ninety s or even earlier that have um, over the years just been added on and added on. Um, you've got a variety of turnover of staff. You've got a variety of different implementations. The sector is trying to deliver solutions into. A number of um, a number of different types of organizations so you end up with this significant complexity. Um, and as a result of that you end up with systems that are very expensive. Um, very. Ah, difficult to maintain they're difficult to procure um and coupled with that. You also have the whole implementation process of these systems and often you know you are running into a number of you know months. Years multi-year type projects just to try and implement a single trm system um over and above that you also have other issues around things like scalability performance. Reliability things like integration with other systems and other platforms and when you add all those things together you can quickly see how you've got quite ah quite a complex problem on your hands.
| 09:19.14 | Martin | Yeah I can quickly subscribe to that I would definitely say having went to some integration projects for Etm Systems Simon I can definitely see that as Well. So lengthy implementation integration projects. Rising up the costs as well that you don't expect upfront but let me ask you because that's very Interesting. So What is your approach and your solution to overcome that lengthy integration projects of integrating a system that has grown and grown over past years.
| 09:51.27 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so so so I guess that's you know, ultimately, where um at trade treke platform comes in so really, as ah as ah as a starting point for that big lump of different problems. We have. Really tried to look at all of those things and come up with solutions to how you how you fix those problems so 1 of the areas that we looked at really right from the get-go with tradecube was this concept of making it fully cloud and um. Multi -tenanted Saas so multi-tenanted saas really is kind of where you want to get to as a platform vendor because in effect what that allows you to do is it allows you to have a single um operational system. But a number of different parties to can connect to and once you have that some of the issues around the more complex side of the business tend to kind of evaporate a little bit. So for example, Alongside. Providing the the solution. We also provide some very rapid onboarding so we have a set of libraries that have standardized industry data if you like standardized products and commodities. That we just supply as part of a data pack alongside the as long alongside the implementation. So what that means is and I'm sure anybody that's been through eto implementation knows a lot of the work involved is really just doing a lot of. Kind of mundane setup type staff to actually get up and running so um, so the starting point of what we look to do with the platform was to just try and tick off each of those particular issues. Um. And using the technology and and using the platforms like Microsoft azure just allow us to be able to do that that bit more quickly and efficiently and ultimately ah more reliably and and cheaper.
| 12:16.79 | chrissass | All right? So so I hear you talking about the technology I hear all the right? Buzzwords you know I hear about cloud I hear about you know, getting there but let's talk a little bit about the problem statement of the business Problem. You solve right? So what is the. Business what has changed substantially is it just a technology problem that that the that the systems have gotten bloated over the years or are the business problems changing along the way.
| 12:41.80 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, So I think that I think as I said earlier the actual environment that you're delivering into is a very broad church so you have the smallest companies through the biggest companies you have people with with physical assets. People that have virtual assets people that are ah primarily trading people that that are primarily hedging so you have all those different complexities all rolled into 1 So ultimately from a. If you like a functional side. What we've tried to focus on is really the core trading Capability. So the ability to be able to very quickly set up your trading portfolio your books be able to add your trades be able to get your. Various kind of metrics analyze your metrics and then really over and above that the other key thing is to be able to integrate those into um what we're calling the ecosystem and I guess we'll talk a little bit about that later on as well.
| 13:52.57 | Martin | I yes, definitely. But I have a very interesting question at least ah in the context of business models I mean chris you mentioned it en Simon you talked a bit about it so that the problem statement of the client is changing. Driven by the Market. So what I can clearly see and I think everybody sees that is renewables is more and more the predominant source of energy throughout europe but also globally so in that context how important is the energy transition for your clients and what do you specifically offer to manage. This transition.
| 14:30.87 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so um, ah you know renewables is definitely ah, an interest in sector I think from our client's perspective it. It. It matters. Um, it matters slightly less because ultimately the energy you're trading is um. That aspect to it that key component of it kind of remains unchanged I think some of the difficulties that come with that is because um because you have things like the sort of intermittency and the ah the it. If I if I if I step back a little bit and think about um where I started my career and in the energy sector. You know we had very big. Um you know gas and coal-fired power stations and. You know they were easy. they were they were from a trading perspective. They were very easy to run and operate because you could um you know you could pretty much control the output you could pretty much forecast exactly how they were going to work sort of maybe breakdowns excluded if you now look at a renewable sector. You've got. Um, a lot more push to shorter term trading that it that basically increases the actual number of trades that that you're doing um because if you own a solar farm and then all of a sudden. It's cloudy for an hour then you'll forecast for that in for that. Output could be significantly different therefore you might have to do a higher volume of spot trading compared to how you might have operated those particular how how you might have operated your portfolio in the past for example
| 16:13.24 | Martin | And yeah would I'm definitely subscribing to that I can see that whole short-term trading organizations are restructured and built from scratch from you of course away from excel or any monolith system in that.
| 16:15.21 | Simon Piercy | So.
| 16:31.64 | Martin | Context What I see is very important to be able to manage this volatile output is to have a real time position Management tool or Environment. So does your solution offer that so that any. Time a trader can see what is my real-time position and act quickly to the market.
| 16:50.60 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, no absolutely and I and I think that's 1 of the key things that we've also kind of considered so in in the big lump of problems that kind of outlined earlier on the the kind of whole performance and scalability. Um, has definitely been an issue in the past and you know we've tackled that. Um and again it's a technology answer but um, you know cloud gives you that cloud gives you the ability to be able to. Ah, for example, spin up, additional virtual servers to be able to cope with an increased amount of um of transactional data. So once you've done that then it becomes more straightforward to then be able to provide that faster response. Um. And and coming to your point specifically. Um you know our portfolio analysis recalculates your trading information. The second that you actually do the trade. So we've come a long way from the kind of batch um updates you know. I mean for a long time. A lot of the trading updates were kind of overnight and then you look to your position report the next day you know that's calm down from from hours to minutes and you know we're we're working on reducing that down from from Minutes to seconds to to microseconds.
| 18:07.81 | Martin | Yeah.
| 18:17.97 | Martin | Yeah, that that sounds great I mean performance and scalability is definitely a key in that environment but let me make maybe 1 step back to the renewables and in general the energy transition I think yeah if you look at the market is. Especially the market prices for c o 2 especially which is going through the roof now this exposure and managing c o 2 exposure is my opinion more and more important in the next years not just for the energy producing industry but also for industrials who are. Sometimes also using etm or ctm solutions. So how do you do you see this development and is your system capable to Manage c o 2 exposure and inventory and all that comes with it.
| 19:09.55 | Simon Piercy | So um, ah we actually designed the the system to be Multi -commodity so the answer is yes, but sort of so um, we primarily primarily the moment kind of dealing with kind of uk. Sorry, not so much uk power but certainly power and gas within the european sector we can do carbon as well. Your little um, kind of addition to the question which said and all the bits around it. Well again, um, that's probably less ours and more the kind of ecosystem partners again. So um, you know we've've we've designed the platform to be able to trade the various commodities. Um, but if you want to do slightly more exotic things like you know ship that information off to um, kind of various per say regulatory parties all that sort of thing. Then that's where we kind of lean on the ecosystem planners to to do that and that gives the flexibility to the to the buyers to be able to say well. Okay, fine if I if I need that I can take it if I don't need it then I'm saving some money.
| 20:21.95 | Martin | Okay, very very interesting and in that context I think C O 2 is not the only exposure or new development in the energy transition that keeps client going and moving forwards also Ppas and what comes with it. T Os or rocks in in Uk are New. Let's say new contract types that needs to be managed at the end as well in an etm system and Ctm Systems. So How is your view in that. How do you see or do you see some of your clients. Struggling with that or what's your view.
| 20:59.25 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, no I mean it's It's certainly an interest in time to be ah to to be doing the the kind of miniseries because you know I Guess if you'd have asked the same questions about 2 months ago then most people would have said well you know we did years all this. All. Ticking along quite nicely. We're not.. We're not unduly kind of worried about these things and then of course in the moment. Um, everything's going crazy and the and the ah you know the volatility is so high. But ultimately I'll I'll come back to to the same point if you have a good quality. Um, etrm system and you you have the ability to be able to track the trades and manage the portfolios and um and have the flexibility to be able to react quickly to new challenges that come Along. Um, then you know. You You should be. You should be perfectly. Okay, where you might struggle is if you if your system's a little bit. Um, kind of rigid if you like if you know and if you've operated the same processes for an awful long time and you don't have the flexibility that maybe the Cloud and. Kind of Api integrations off you. It might be a little bit more of a struggle and you could be kind of kind of back to spreadsheets and and things like that which is not really where you want to be so yeah, absolutely um, there's there's there's continual change within the sector and you know. Vendors have to be in a they they have to be pretty agile to be able to to to cope with the challenges that can sometimes ah appear at relatively short notice.
| 22:41.90 | chrissass | So so I appreciate it I'm hearing you talking about apis I'm hearing you talk about connectivity. But what you said before which I'd like you to talk a bit more is about you said if you have the right ecosystem so describe your ecosystem or how you either envision it. Being or how it is today. Maybe that would be helpful.
| 22:58.97 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so um I think um, you've got you've really got 2 ways that you can solve the etrn and problem you can either have 1 system that tries to do absolutely everything and there were systems out there that do that and and. Um, that's that's kind of fine but those tend to be back into the you know the complex monolith difficult to implement or you can take a ah slightly different view and um, my observation of the way the industry has kind of moved over the last 10 years is that there's very very good third- party vendors out there that are specializing in specific areas that are not maybe traditionally kind of core etrn but are very important to the overall ecosystem. So um, the question then becomes as ah as an etrn vendor. Do you want to try and have the the great big system that does absolutely everything or um, in our case is it slightly better to say well actually what we'll do is we'll do our core components and we'll do them very well. But what we'll also do is we'll open those up to the world so that the ability to get information in and out of the platforms suddenly becomes a lot easier and once you're in that space then um what you can then do is you can then. Get um yeah know like-minded. Let's call them peripheral organizations or or third parties that are very good at say for example, operations or back office or um or regulation or. You know the the swathe of things that that you need to do um and just have good reliable interfaces to those other systems so that you then get a kind of better sum of parts. You're not reliant on a single vendor. Um, you're not reliant on a single vendor being expert at everything um and the nice thing about it is that as I say you can pick and choose the bits that you want to use and the analogy I use is ah it's a little bit like an app store. Um on your phone which which. You know we've all got used to again over the last 10 years you buy a phone and it does the phone calls when it does the text messages. But maybe you want it to also be able to do um a gps tracking or a weather application or something like that and.
| 25:46.68 | Simon Piercy | You don't necessarily go to the phone vendor to get all that stuff you go to the phone vendor for the main application then you go to the app store for the other good quality. Add -ons that that work in harmony with the phone so I would I'd liken it to that. Um. And I think overall the the quality of the offering is um is is improved.
| 26:13.41 | Martin | That sounds very Interesting. You mentioned a ah great buword here so app stores as I understand you provide the basic applications to your clients and they can pick whether they want to go with them or not and pick a single ones only or the whole. Offer But how is it about developing new applications for your clients can they in a rather easy and structured way develop new applications or services and integrate them well in the existing core apps that might come from you.
| 26:48.67 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, absolutely. So um, we actually probably uniquely within the sector we actually have got a number of our interfaces that um we provide the so source code for on Github. So if anybody wants to get started with write in their own. Um their own applications then they can do that they can take some the source code that we've got as an example for maybe a different interface. And and then you can just take that and use that to to write their own similar interface. So it's innovations like that that we're kind of bringing to the to the fore that you know ultimately just make the the platform more flexible and. Um, of course people always want to do their own stuff and with the api and the code samples and it just saw being very standardized. Um, yeah, absolutely you can you can definitely write your own. Your own staff to go alongside the standardized components.
| 27:57.42 | chrissass | So Excited about the api is excited that you can customize and and write your own code I guess 1 of the things that I think would be a challenge you you talked in your introduction about perhaps some monolithic legacy software out there platforms are a bit hard now. And unless you're a brand new Trader coming into the industry. This isn't greenfield So what is the migration strategy for someone that has 1 of these monolithic platforms to go to yours or are those not your target customers.
| 28:27.45 | Simon Piercy | And you know I think right now that that that's not really our target customers I think there's a yeah, a very long tail of organizations that that probably have. No system's at all or they're just setting up or they have some spreadsheets or they have systems that they're not very happy with um, you know? Ah, we're quite realistic about that part of our offering um is not that the the big 3 hree-year project to do a migration really? Ah, a lot of the. Um, you know a lot of our focus is just getting the you know fairly poorly served smaller clients often running now with that said, you know if if there's a. Organizations out there that like the sound of um, the kind of saas and cloud solution. Then yeah for sure, we'd have a conversation with them. Um, and indeed we we sort of have 2 primary offerings. We have an enterprise platform just for that. Um, for that exactly that type of. Customer. But I think to start with um you know the multicent multi multitenanted route where you can just sign up and use the use. The platform is the ah is the route to go so we'll get there maybe in a few years but right now. We're we're happy tatling they are tackling the smaller guys.
| 29:59.45 | Martin | Okay, talking about the smaller guys Simon That's quite interesting and what I can see is that they usually don't have resources and also the skills to maintain and support. Such a solution. So What do you offer in that context is your solution fully hosted fully supported and fully maintain if the client wants that.
| 30:21.69 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, absolutely so um, from a client perspective. You don't actually need to particularly worry about any kind of infrastructure any databases you can go to our website and and just sign up and then. Everything is kind of managed through the platform. We've also got some innovations around things like environment management. We can from our platform schedule activities such as ah, such as backups and other kind of maintenance tasks which you can basically do. You know with 1 click on the platform rather than needing an an it team and you will and you know having a specialist people there just to support the application for sure you're going to need some kind of power users to kind of understand why they do it? Um, but. Yeah, you, you need zero kind of it expertise just to just to get started and a little srinkling of it expertise if you do need to do. For example, you know so some interfaces or some custom um custom reports all that sort of thing.
| 31:32.20 | chrissass | So it sounds like you. You've thought through your your market space very well. Um, your relatively young company. Um, so where are you in the life of your company today where what's real what? what's alpha, what's beta where are you.
| 31:48.30 | Simon Piercy | Well, um, you know it is very early. You're absolutely right? You know we, we've not been around very long. Um, we've been pretty busy, um, kind of doing 2 things really side by side. So 1 is developing the functional stuff. So. Bits and pieces that people expect to see within yeahrm um system the other thing that's kind of like a bit more hidden is that we've also done a lot of work on the infrastructure in the environment and just things like improving our. Kind of builds and now releases we sort of we sort of operated a devops platform. Um so the net result of that is that you know. For example, we can do upgrades much Simpler. We can do releases much simpler. So we've been focusing quite a lot on. Um. On that side of things in terms of you know what's what's alpha whatsby do well? Um, the great thing about Cloud is that you know it's basically just continual improvement. So um, how how we tend to work is that we have the stuff that's out there. Um, is out there and that stuff works and then customers come to us and um, they want different things and we have ideas about things. We want to add and then over time we just basically kind of roll them out. So um, there isn't quite the same kind of concept. With cloud and you know you're on this version and somebody else is on that version. You know everybody's on the same version. It has to work like that. So a lot of what we're doing is just an awful lot of checking and testing to make sure everything all works which we used to expect and then gradually releasing. Kind of upgrades and and in little packages and from a user perspective. You know they log on 1 day and they see that we've you know, added this feature or this menu or this little bit that makes things a little bit Better. So it. It really is a case of just. Continual improvement.
| 33:59.10 | chrissass | So I understand the agile development and bringing things in from time to time I guess what are the lessons learned from having done this so you've you've rolled out some customers. At this point you're you're not Brand new. Um. I mean I obviously architecturally you know we understand this software. We understand the process and having the continue rollout. What have you learned specific to the energy traders in in doing this other challenges there that they should got you with this environment and that kind of set up.
| 34:27.90 | Simon Piercy | Well is. It's not going to be for everybody. You know I think um, it was interesting. Actually I was talking to to to an industry colleague and they were saying that they had done an awful lot of work in terms of reducing the number of different builds out that they had for their clients so they were you know. So So so on the 1 side of the fence. You've got you know the the 1 bill per client sort of thing and that's always an absolutely kind of terrible situation. The other risk that you also run in this sector is that you get um. You know customer-specific boltons if you like so um, you know fairly? Um, you know fairly grotdy case statements or switch statements or something like that that says you know if it's Customer X Do this and customer y do that. Those things are always an absolute disaster in the long term so we've done our level best to try and avoid that. Um.
| 35:25.60 | chrissass | So how did you get the industry not to do that because my experience with energy traders. Everybody's special and everybody the larger they are the more special they get to how are you reeducating the industry.
| 35:35.32 | Simon Piercy | Um, well I think the I think that the answer is that we we just don't have those larger clients you know so that's it so in that the you know that's maybe 1 of the benefits of operating on the side of the market that we do that you know people are just so happy that they can get like a.
| 35:40.42 | chrissass | Okay.
| 35:53.49 | Simon Piercy | Ah, system up and running and it hasn't cost um half a million dollars that you know where you can get away with a little bit more you know. So Yeah I mean um, if if you have the um, the kind of whales if you like you know for for that. Come along from time to Time. You just have to make sure you just don't get eaten up by them and I think that's definitely ah, that's definitely a lesson of history that you know you as a software V. You've just got to try and avoid so yeah, absolutely,, There's a lot of there's a lot of pitfalls there but you know. I Think just having the courage of conviction in mind to just not get yourself too too dazzled by by big clients or big contracts that that you end Up. Just creating a massive problem for yourself somewhere else down the line.
| 36:50.90 | chrissass | So 1 other question is we kind of get towards the tail end of this section of the show is you? You talked about the problems too I didn't hear you talk about reporting or reports or or. You know visual visualization of data is is that something that's important with your architecture is that something that works in the old world is that something the newer architectures do better. What What do you? think there.
| 37:15.11 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so and 2 different things there sort of I'd separate them out so visualizations. Yeah, absolutely we do that we you know we we we call the platform form tradequebe because on the 1 hand you have trading and on the other side you have kind of like a cube analytics. Capability so on the analytic side. We can do the whole manner of slice and dice and you can um you know you can kind of graph that chart that we've got a whole package of different ways that you can do that so that's um, that's absolutely provided. Um, and the other thing you mentioned was reports and you know again, this is this is just learning the hard way over the years you can never write a standard serve report that pleases anybody so this time round we just didn't bother trying what we actually have is we've developed some. Basically standard web services. So we've got a number of very specific endpoints that just basically give people the numbers that they want so you can use the api you can pass in a few parameters and then it basically gives. Gives you the metrics that you want to you know, just just the raw numbers and then you can use that to put it into your reporting platform of choice or put it in your own data warehouse or to really do whatever you choose to do that we have. Kind of in the process of some grafana integration. So grafana is pretty cool for for charting so and again that just relies on you having and some api that that that spits up numbers in the right type of format. So once you have um. Once you have those core components in place. A lot of the reporting answer just kind of drops out but um, and and we even support writing your own reports in ah in our own little report engine. Should you really really want to but the minute anybody asks for that sort of stuff. Usually the question is well do you really want that. But do you just want that because you've always had that report for the last twenty years and and the answer is usually no actually we really just want to be able to get the numbers and do stuff with it.
| 39:37.30 | Martin | That sounds like a very modern approach towards having a flexible reporting framework rather than having some rigid reports that everybody should use I can definitely see that the industry is seeking out for that by coming From. Reporting or moving away from reporting and coming to Automation. We have talked about it at the very beginning and understood that your solution is quite performant to handle a lot of short-term or short spot trades within a short time. Also providing a real-time positioning management but in that context of automation and maybe that's not a target for your customers. But maybe it is talking about automated trading and Ungo trading I can definitely see this is on the rise across the whole industry. And that brings of course challenges talking about developing strategies for multiple end Users brings me to the to the challenge of what the question does your system provide. Sort of a development framework so that so multiple users can work same time in a structured environment to code strategies.
| 40:58.46 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so specifically you know we don't have anything within the platform around algo trading. But we do have to say the api so that basically allows you access trade into the system to be able to. Get the information ah in and out as as you need, um, they are kind of very similar to the um to to 1 of the previous answers. Um, you know we provide sample code for people to be able to write these things themselves. I guess 1 of the things about algo trading is that you know typically people tend to want to have those as proprieary bits of of ip anyway. So I think everybody has their own idea of what algo trades would work for them and would that necessarily work for. For anybody else. So I think the short answer is um, again, no not we we don't provide anything within the um, the platform again I think our target mark our target audience is probably you know, not quite at the level where you're going to be. Looking at that. But that's today maybe in a few years time it you know it'll it'll be that you have to do it because you don't really have much choice. Um, and then we would then lean on the kind of scalability and performance type. Um.
| 42:09.90 | Martin | Yeah, yeah.
| 42:26.90 | Simon Piercy | You know capabilities that we have to kind of say look you know if you're ramping up your trading and you're doing you know 10 times the volumes you're doing now then you know we can cope with that. So.
| 42:37.75 | chrissass | that's that's that's ah interesting we've gone through I think a pretty good journey through your solution before we wrap and move to that the the speed round here anything that that I didn't ask or Martin didn't ask that you feel proud of or that we missed or that you. Want the audience to hear about your solution before we move on because I don't know your solution well enough to to know what I missed but is there any segment that that we should have covered in your opinion.
| 43:02.00 | Simon Piercy | Um, you know I think all I would say is that um you know, really we are trying to solve some of those long-standing problems within within etrm. Um, so um, you know we kind of see ourselves as being disruptive in in that. Regard We see ourselves as being very innovative. Um, and um, you know I think that the world is in a position now where it's slowly going to kind of ebb away from the kind of monolith model and maybe move towards. Um, you know a little bit more of ah, a kind of dynamic model if you like a little bit more of ah, um, you know, Definitely Cloud. Definitely yeah, software as a service and you know it's really interesting to be. Kind of ah 1 of the 1 of the early adopters in in that space. So yeah, it's it's it's exciting I Think as as I say as as a technologist. Um, it's really great to be. You know, working with these sort of cutting edge technologies and you know implemented them making. Allowing people to get the use of them. Um, but but yes, exciting times.
| 44:23.14 | chrissass | Well thank you for sharing the solution. We're going to move into the next segment of the program here and what we have here is we have 10 questions we ask each etm um vendor that we bring on their program the same 10 questions. Martin and I are gonna alternate back in first I'm going to start with the first question I'll ask you a question and he'll ask a question if you can offer a concise answer. That's good if we want some clarity 1 of us will jump in and ask for a little bit of clarity. So don't don't think that you misspoke we might just want to get a little bit more clarity if we do ask a follow up. But without much further ado we'll move to the speed round here as I call it and I'll ask you the first question so in your opinion will the the market or vendors for each year m solutions shrink or expand in the future.
| 45:07.37 | Simon Piercy | Um, I think that they will expand I think the whole market for trading will expand um you see individuals trading now you know there's a lot more individuals trading because platforms are open in our platforms like Robin hood people. Love trading crypto. Um, you know so I don't see any of this contracting.
| 45:31.72 | Martin | So how many deals per minute must a modern e t m or ctm system today. Be capable to import yeah deals per minute.
| 45:40.10 | Simon Piercy | Ah deals per minute. Did you say well. Um I mean I don't know maybe maybe you could do ten second so you should be able to be able. You should be able to do or run the numbers 600 600 a minute.
| 45:58.30 | Martin | Okay.
| 45:58.98 | Simon Piercy | Easily.
| 46:00.26 | chrissass | Cool. So what commodity types and energy types are you offering and which ones do you consider your biggest strength.
| 46:08.14 | Simon Piercy | So yeah, So the the platform is Cross-commodity So We take the kind of key trading components. Ah across all commodity spaces our background as individuals are In. European power and gas. So That's where we focus. But if you want to trade something a bit different then we actually think we have about 1 hundred and 6 separate commodities that you that you yeah that you can pick off um but we don't have a huge amount of ecosystem around. Some of the more exotic things. So European power and gas for the moment and and then beyond that almost anything.
| 46:55.75 | Martin | Interesting. So we have probably covered that next questionary. But for comparison reason I'm anyway asking it. So do you offer a real time position Management Module and how many trades can you process with this real time.
| 47:12.96 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so um, so we have the um we have a few mechanisms that basically trigger when you put a trade in and 1 of those is something that will update your.
| 47:14.57 | Martin | Position module 3
| 47:32.21 | Simon Piercy | Class them as cube metrics. But for for your question you could look at it as as ah as portfolio. Um, and it triggers straight away and it takes a fraction of a second to recalculate it. We put a lot of work into just. Recalculating the section of the portfolio that's changed rather than kind of like aggregating everything each time and then it's lightning fast.
| 47:58.90 | chrissass | Cool next question. So do you have an automated workflow for straight through processing.
| 48:04.45 | Simon Piercy | Um, yes, we do. We have? Um, we have connectivity from exchanges using our exchange partner and we have connectivity through to high quality backoffice Solutions. So um, again. But we we would encourage people to automate as much as they can. So. So yeah, absolutely.
| 48:30.92 | Martin | Interesting talking about pricing a bit can your solution price Asian options.
| 48:39.17 | Simon Piercy | Um, no I'm pretty sure we can't we we we we're probably a little bit way behind the curve on that sadly but you know we'll put it on the list of things to do Now you've mentioned it.
| 48:44.33 | Martin | Forgive. Okay.
| 48:53.84 | Martin | Create.
| 48:54.27 | chrissass | All right? So are you offering a fully integrated full integration and implementation service for your eachram solution.
| 49:02.86 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, absolutely so you can you can get set up and running just by clicking the link on our website so you don't if you don't actually want to do any implementation. You don't have to.. It's all it's all done by us. Um, and yeah, we'll support you along the way if you want to use some consultants. That's fine, Nothing wrong with that at all. But yeah, it's It's designed to be super quick and super easy.
| 49:35.22 | Martin | Um, very convenient in your opinion. What is the biggest threat for third party etm vendors and solutions.
| 49:46.13 | Simon Piercy | When you say third party. What do you mean like.
| 49:49.44 | Martin | Um, like vendors like you providing a solution to to customers.
| 49:53.25 | Simon Piercy | Okay, well there isn't a huge amount. There's a threat to us you know because because we're the yeah, we're the small guys chewing at the heels of the of the bigger guys. But I guess the bigger guys might. Look to us as a bit of a threat at some point. So but that that doesn't it certainly doesn't doesn't worry me too much.
| 50:18.99 | chrissass | Okay, um, so how does your licensing model work and is it going to change in the future.
| 50:27.92 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so licensing is really easy. We just charge a fixed per user per month per environment cost and um, we don't have a. Lengthy contract tie-in so you can use it for um, for for a month and then kind of say no, that's enough. Thank you. We also provide a free trial as well. So you can get on board used for events. Check it, check it all does what we say it does and then um. And then really you just roll into sort of standard standard monthly fees. Um, yeah, is it good. Sorry is it going to change the answer to that is no I don't think so I think we're committed. We're committed to that model.
| 51:11.21 | chrissass | So is your.
| 51:19.18 | chrissass | So is your pricing model no volumes or I mean you said you're targeting smaller enterprises so at certain volumes. There's no breaks or are there breaks at certain price points or anything like it's always a flat rate no matter how many transactions.
| 51:26.30 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, so no matter how many transactions so it's just a per user. Um, um, yeah per user per environment month fee so yeah I mean um, if somebody comes along and wants like a million like trades or something with 1 user that might raise a question mark. But I think we kind of see ourselves a little bit like ah you know a classic sas. You know if you use Microsoft if you use office 3 11 they don't billy you by the number of emails you send. So. Um, you know we're we're trying to stick very much to that very pure model of software as a service.
| 52:06.88 | chrissass | Thank you.
| 52:08.76 | Martin | Cool. So last questions Liman we have talked about it at least parts of that question. Are you offering an api and what is the technology behind it.
| 52:24.35 | Simon Piercy | Yep, so we do have for an api. So the api covers the entirety of the platform. Um the from a user perspective. It's a it's a rest api so you have to you basically have to. It's all it's all json ultimately and the technology behind it the the entire platform is written in Microsoft c-shar on it.
| 52:51.26 | Martin | Okay, cool. Thanks.
| 52:53.94 | chrissass | So we've gotten through the speed round those are the same questions. The other vendors will answer as well. So we'll get there. Um Martin before we kind of wrap up this episode any final thoughts or questions that come to your mind.
| 53:07.66 | Martin | Not for now very satisfied. Thank you simon.
| 53:11.47 | chrissass | So simon I do have 1 that I don't think we covered in the in the flow of the interview. Um, what's your support model like.
| 53:19.20 | Simon Piercy | So yeah, the support model is very straightforward. So I mentioned that per user per um per month fee I mean that includes support as well. So basically within that fee. Um, you can raise any questions and my support team will take a look at it. Ah, you get free upgrades as well. So that's included so again just trying to just make it as simple as possible for for organizations to to be able to budget if you want something that goes Beyond. You know something is not working the system if you want something that is a like an enhancement or some professional services. Yeah, for sure we will charge for that. But normally it's all kind of bundled into the ah into the single phase just make it real straightforward.
| 54:11.51 | chrissass | Well thank you I just felt that we missed that 1 area and I wanted to cover that. But thank you for bringing that in I want to thank you for being on our our program I think our audience is going to appreciate the clarity and understanding of where you are in the market I will give you 1 final thought before I close up the episode if you want to share anything last.
| 54:31.47 | Simon Piercy | Um, yeah I just appreciate the opportunity to come on here. Ah chris and Martin um I have enjoyed listening to your your podcast now now I knew I was coming on so I just say that.
| 54:31.48 | chrissass | Please do.
| 54:50.23 | Simon Piercy | Yeah, they're very insightful and I hope people enjoyed the show today.
| 54:53.40 | chrissass | Well thank you for so much for being our guest and sharing with us for the insider guide to energy audience. Ah the educational ministries and each your m will all come out at once. So if you're just listening to this. Don't forget to listen to all the episodes that are out and thank you for joining us today.
| 55:10.10 | Simon Piercy | Thank you.
| 55:11.48 | Martin | Thank you.