Multinational Energy & Commodity trading firm

The Challenge

Providing accurate, consistent data to the business, how they need it, when they need it, cost-effectively.

A growing and changing organization and is challenged to react to business change, evolving risks, and new opportunities, and stay aligned with business vision and value. Over the last decade, their transaction management (and supporting) systems landscape changed dramatically, and that complexity manifested itself into bespoke system integrations, ad-hoc data aggregation, and manpower-intensive processes.

This left the firm in a position of tactically choosing between two equally unappealing options: (a) throw more headcount at the problem, or (b) continue to Band-Aid their
existing infrastructure that was built for low volume, end-of-day batch driven requirements. Both options added cost, risk, and inefficiency, and constrained, rather than enabled, growth.

They knew they needed to find a way to:

• Consolidate and report data more accurately.
• Support business processes that crossed trade management systems.
• React to changes and complexity in the business more quickly.
• Report information in a more timely fashion e) Reduce operational risk and improve resource utilization.

The Solution

The favoured approach was to tackle this sizeable initiative by making incremental improvements.
Among the first of these was selecting CubeLogic as the “Risk Data Warehouse”.

What attracted the firm to CubeLogic was our ability to rapidly execute on their strategic vision with a proven vendor/partner, easily connect/disconnect to upstream and downstream data sources, and model their business processes and requirements in the platform. CubeLogic houses all transactions, prices, and contracts across the business, regardless of where they initiated.

With a central repository in place, the global firm could now tackle multiple business requirements including:

• Credit Management – with the deployment of Cube, multiple legacy and redundant systems and resource intensive processes could be retired, saving significant cost.
• Financial Trade Accounting – CubeLogic provides full-cycle analyses on financial performance incorporating trading, fees, foreign exchange, tax etc., and mapping to GL accounts and reporting hierarchies.
• Aggregated Position Management The Position Cube is key to tracking all traded instruments and asset classes globally in real-time, and allowing the business to avoid potential risks, and take advantage of market opportunities.

Outcomes and Benefits

• Re-architecture of the data management processes by moving to incremental, near-realtime data loads from their upstream trading systems to CubeLogic via a message bus.
• Users can now manage the business intra-day, rather than performing an end-of-day batch process and seeing results the next morning.
• Significant cost saving – predicted to reduce annual spend by $0.5M over the first three years
• Users being more self-sufficient
• IT infrastructure now scales with the business
• Elimination of redundant interfaces
• Improved Business Intelligence reporting
• Less time spend gathering data and more time spent analyzing it