COVID-19:
EXTRAORDINARY ACCELERATOR OF TRENDS?
You’ve probably heard about the 3 ds quite a lot in the past few years – and I’m not talking about the 3D glasses to see the latest action movie! Decarbonisation, decentralisation, digitalisation. In the commodity and energy trading world, these global trends have developed very strongly in recent years, in light of environmental awareness, and technology developments.
During the Energy Trading Week and the Commodity Trading Week events, hosted online in October, participants explored these tendencies through the disrupting prism of the COVID-19 crisis. What have been the effects of the pandemic on decarbonisation, decentralisation and digitalisation?
One thing everyone agreed on has been that this crisis, with its challenges around communication and business continuity, has been a very efficient accelerator for digital projects across the energy and commodity trading sectors. The vast majority of the companies involved shared that they have been generally satisfied with their current support systems, but they also pointed out that working from home has caused a massive push to improve accessibility, speed, and flow of processes. As a result vendors have never been so busy as they had to swiftly transition to 100% remote implementations. There is now consensus around the necessity of having cloud-based applications and systems, despite residual security fears, and that is a real change for the CTRM landscape in particular.
With the wind fully in its sails, digital transformation is well under way in many trading firms, utilities and oil majors. Alongside some interesting initiatives such as the blockchain-based small-scale LNG trading platform at Uniper, we also see emerging hybrid solutions combining the most basic automation tools with artificial intelligence, creating endless improvement possibilities for those who embrace them. Digitalisation is making its way into supply chain management and those who have digitised their value chain were able to react with a lot more efficiency during the peak of the crisis. However this also highlighted the issue of standardisation of data, and it was good to see such good will in that space, especially in the oil trading sector, via several initiatives developed by LEAP and their members, and in the power and gas trading sector, with the eSM initiative (electronic Settlement Matching) led by EFET, the former in particular clearly benefiting from the new ‘no- contact’ requirement to transfer crucial documentation along the supply chain.
WITH THE WIND FULLY IN ITS SAILS, DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS WELL UNDER WAY IN MANY TRADING FIRMS, UTILITIES AND OIL MAJORS.
20 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | Q4 Edition
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