One of Japan’s major traders of physical crude oil has deployed software as a service (SaaS) trade and risk management by Aspect Enterprise Solutions (AES) across its global operations.

AspectCTRM is being rolled out to trading seats at Petro-Diamond’s offices in Tokyo, Singapore, and London, replacing worksheet-based systems as the company seeks to manage risk implicit in an increasing volume of buy/store/sell/ship trades of physical products, and associated trades of derivatives for hedging.

“The pattern of our business is evolving with the times and we are forced to do more position taking in combination with hedges to mitigate risk, which exposed the limitations of worksheet-based techniques,” says Tony Nunan, assistant general manager of the Risk Management Office at Petro-Diamond’s parent company Mitsubishi Corporation. “As trading volumes increase, so too does the clerical workload and any mistake propagates across multiple worksheets. We felt we needed an automated solution that lifted this burden, is integrated and gives full transparency across several geographical locations in real-time.”

Nunan and his colleagues cut eight vendors down to a short-list of three before selecting AspectCTRM on grounds of cost of ownership, and ease of deployment. He says the SaaS delivery model is right for the times. “No upfront purchase cost, no need for investment in third party software or servers, and no need for an IT department to maintain them. AspectCTRM also meant we could deploy quickly. We went from a one month trial at our three sites straight into commercial deployment. Traders got up to speed by inputting actual live trades in parallel with the old worksheet system, so at the end of the four week trial period AspectCTRM was populated with live current positions.”

“Petro-Diamond is a market leader among oil trading companies worldwide,” says Kishor Sujanani, Vice President of Sales Asia Pacific at AES. “We have worked closely with them to clearly understand their specific market and operational requirements and have demonstrated how the integrated AspectCTRM can meet their needs for rapid global deployment of a common CTRM platform.”

The any-to-many scalability of AES’ SaaS solutions and the speed with which they can be deployed contrasts dramatically with legacy systems which typically take a year or more to implement and which fail to effectively scale downwards to support smaller trading operations. Even in a large scale fully end-to-end implementation, key elements of AspectCTRM, such as deal capture and risk analysis, can be in place, working and delivering value within a matter of days, with successive additional elements going live as the progress of integration projects allows.

Aspect Enterprise Solutions provides enterprise class market information, trade and decision support tools for energy, metals and commodities professionals. The company delivers near real time position keeping, risk management, market prices and intelligence to users virtually anywhere, anytime. Trusted by over 500 corporations in more than 80 countries, the company's solutions routinely support more than $10Bn of transactions every day. They go live quicker, fit more exactly and deliver greater ROI yet cost far less to implement than first generation offerings. See http://www.aspectenterprise.com for more information.