Winners 2012

Commodity Market Development ...

Commodity Data Management

The ability to retrieve, reconcile, manipulate, examine, and diagnose the real business dynamics across the organisation requires sophisticated data management capabilities. Data management covers those service providers who enable commodity market practitioners to build and integrate quality into their operations and product offerings by automating organisational data in such a way as to accelerate discovery, analysis and diagnosis. This ensures more sophisticated and 'cleaner' communication between the business units, quality assurance, and smoother IT operations.

Financial institutions need to perform more calculations and submit more data to regulators than ever before. This requires larger data sets containing historical data over longer time periods and increased granularity to feed models, forecasts and trading systems. New regulatory and compliance requirements are also placing greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting, driving the need for deeper and more transparent analyses across organisations. Companies are also looking to leverage large amounts of customer data across multiple delivery channels (branch, Web) with mobile applications and internet-connected devices creating greater pressures on the ability of technology infrastructures and networks.

The ability to identify and understand aggregated commodity risk exposures is critical using data manipulation to allow customised views of the business. This is particularly important for those organisations that have multiple data sources and formats coming from different operational silos and providers. Allowing these sometime disparate inputs to be reconciled, thus consolidating results, is a focus here – that is, systems integration to better manage workflows.

In this way, all relevant information can be aggregated and examined so that managers can act quickly. Pricing, reference data, data for analysis, decision support, trading, risk management, position optimisation, scheduling, storage, operations, sales, and reporting – integrated across the firm. The ability to reconcile and manipulate data has become all the more critical as the demands put on the industry from competitive peers and the regulators increases.

The Shortlisted Nominees will be those companies that have led the way in allowing commodity business to flourish and progress in this environment. This Award will be granted based upon the views of the Awards Advisory Panel, Votes Cast, and supported by market research conducted by leading CTRM market advisory firms.