Commodities technology house of the year: Topaz Technology

Topaz Technology, winner of Commodities technology house of the year in the 2025 Energy Risk Asia awards, is seeing increased traction for its unique approach to commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) in the form of a platform that can be applied either on a standalone basis or to augment existing CTRM architecture.

The London-based company provides advanced commodity trading and risk analytics for traders and risk teams, with a platform that combines CTRM risk reporting, real-time trader tools and advanced quantitative analytics in a unified valuation and reporting framework.

A huge amount of work has gone into Topaz to ensure users can present all of this risk, and value it in a unified way across different concerns

Justin Howat, Topaz Technology

“If you’re purely a derivatives trader, you can use Topaz on a standalone basis,” says Justin Howat, Topaz’s chief commercial officer. “But clients with physical trading, which requires a lot of logistics and back-office functionality, use it as an add-on specifically for risk management and valuation.”

The platform provides highly flexible reporting and position-viewing functionality, including offering unified position reporting across different physical commodities, and vanilla and structured derivatives. “A huge amount of work has gone into Topaz to ensure users can present all of this risk, and value it in a unified way across these different concerns,” Howat says.

It stands out for its automatic scalability, he says, allowing users to dramatically increase their processor and memory use at times of heavy load, such as at the end of day or when running large numbers of Monte Carlo simulations.

Its customers include derivatives market-makers, energy supermajors and commodity trading houses. They use Topaz to value and risk-manage oil, liquefied natural gas, biofuels, freight, power, gas, carbon and metals, and across derivatives (exchange-traded, over-the-counter, vanilla and structured) and physical (including physical and asset optionality).

The company is seeing growing demand from Asia-based customers, to the extent that its co-founder and head of quantitative analysis, Alex McGuire, relocated to Singapore earlier this year.

Recent implementations include the go-live of Topaz’s derivatives functionality at a large Singapore-based commodities trader, and the kick-off of Topaz’s physical model enhancement project.

The company has added numerous new features to the platform over the past 12 months, including new pricing formula language and allowing users to write formulas themselves using local and external variables from the physical trade. It has also added enhancements to its profit-and-loss (P&L) change explanation, allowing users to drill down into the factors influencing P&L.

The reputation of Topaz within the global commodities trading community, in particular in Asia, has continued to grow in the past year

Jon Fox, Topaz Technology

The company can point to strong worldwide revenue growth – which doubled between 2023 and 2024 – and a tripling in headcount between 2022 and 2025.

Looking ahead, Topaz is planning to add more staff, including in Singapore, to support a strong sales pipeline, with several proof-of-concept projects under way at large Asian trading companies. It is also co-developing its enhanced generalised physical model with a large Singaporean customer to enable Topaz to more fully integrate the physical chain of events with any CTRM’s own model. “This will enable the client to continue using its CTRM for logistics while ensuring Topaz reflects valuation and risk in a way that maps directly onto the CTRM, which remains the system of record for logistics and back-office activities,” Howat says.

“The reputation of Topaz within the global commodities trading community, in particular in Asia, has continued to grow in the past year,” concludes Jon Fox, Topaz CEO. “With my co-founder Alex running the Singapore operation, we look forward to building up our presence further in the region.”