Energy Risk Awards 2020: The winners

- Stella Farrington
- 18 May 2020

The past 18 months have been extremely challenging for all firms involved in commodities risk management. Even before the unprecedented demand shock of Covid-19, the energy markets were having a wild ride. Firms that outperformed in this market had to thrive despite falling prices, wild volatility and huge geopolitical events increasing uncertainty. This has been a major test, not only for the risk systems and controls in place at energy trading firms and banks, but for the entire risk ecosystem of the commodities space.

Advances in technology have played a huge part, allowing firms to reap the benefits of new innovations in trading, analytics and risk management. Fortunately, the digitalisation of the energy world was well under way before Covid-19 forced lockdowns and remote working in energy firms and trading shops the world over. Remarkably, most firms were able to adapt overnight to the new situation, and trading in energy and metals was pretty much unaffected by distanced working.

This year’s awards celebrate various technological achievements that are improving the commodities risk management space. Our energy technology award goes to NatGasHub.com for its natural gas multi-pipeline scheduling software. Rather than searching the websites of multiple pipeline companies, traders and schedulers can use just one website and even automate gas scheduling with multiple natural gas pipelines simultaneously. Another firm using tech to increase transparency and efficiency is Pexapark, the winner of this year’s innovation of the year award. Pexapark’s pricing and valuation engine PexaQuote aims to bring greater transparency, price discovery and liquidity to the renewable energy power purchase agreement market than has ever been seen before.

This firm is also representative of the other huge theme throughout this year’s awards – renewable energy, environmental achievement and climate risk assessment. Most of our key house of the year awards all had a strong environmental bent. Macquarie Group and Engie, which both picked up environmental products awards, are leading the way when it comes to being green in many jurisdictions. The other awards they clinched – oil & products for Macquarie, and natural gas/LNG and electricity for Engie – all emphasised the importance of climate to their operations. This was also the case for Societe Generale, winner of this year’s energy and commodities finance award, and BNP Paribas, which picked up base metals house of the year. This year also saw our inaugural climate risk innovation award, which was won by Baringa Partners for its climate risk model, something that was produced through years of painstaking work.

Because of Covid-19, the Energy Risk Awards ceremony, which usually takes place in May each year, has been postponed until September. However, in the meantime, we are delighted to announce all our winners below. Full articles explaining why each firm won are being released between May 18 and the end of June.

Derivatives house of the year

Macquarie Group

Corporate risk manager of the year

Uniper

Oil & products house of the year

Macquarie Group

Natural gas/LNG house of the year

Engie

Electricity house of the year

Engie

Emissions house of the year

Element Markets