CTRM software house of the year, Asia: Enuit

Even a global pandemic could not prevent Enuit from launching the latest version of its flagship commodity trading and risk management system (CTRM) last July. The new solution, Entrade Unite, represents a multi-year collaboration with the vendor’s clients and will be a “game-changer” for the space, says chief executive Ken Han.

Entrade Unite, which is the seventh version of Enuit’s flagship product, builds on Han’s vision for the future of digitalisation in the commodity trading space. It combines a CTRM with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution in a single platform, without the need for modules to integrate the two systems.

“Entrade Unite combines the CTRM world with the ERP world,” Han says. “Typically, CTRMs contain all of the necessary market risk data and the logic risk engine to complete calculations based on snapshots of the market. And then the ERP system monitors market events, but the relevant calculations are completed on a spreadsheet and then added to the system. Entrade Unite combines these two worlds, providing calculation engines [that work] in real time to manage areas including credit, risk and accounting.”

Enuit has been working with a range of clients to refine Entrade Unite in recent years. “Entrade Unite was already on Enuit’s roadmap. [Because] we had a shared vision with our clients, we were able to progress with these plans at a much faster pace,” Han says.

One such client – the minerals and metals trading division of a global commodities business – engaged Enuit to work on a digital transformation project for its commodities operations. Over the past year, this project has involved building a digital trading platform to manage physical and derivatives risks, with the ability to monitor credit and market risk on a real-time basis.

The client went live with the system in October 2019 for two commodity segments. “It has been a great experience to go through this journey of digital transformation, and the fruits of this system are there for people to see. We have come out stronger at the end [of this process],” the CEO of the client company said in a recent presentation about working on this project with Enuit.

The company is now working on phase two of the project with Enuit, which will see the system rolled out to two additional markets. The company is also developing a management dashboard and believes the interface could also be used by customers and suppliers in the future.

Han shares this vision that Entrade Unite could evolve to support the complete digital transformation of commodity businesses. This would eliminate any need for risk managers to get involved in manual management of data and enable greater connectivity with customers and suppliers.

“Clients will be able to streamline all internal data management, with users’ clients and trading partners connecting with them through this kind of platform,” Han says. “Entrade Unite provides a great framework for the market to go in that direction.”

More generally, Han says one of the crucial elements underpinning Entrade’s development is that it was built as a multi-commodity CTRM, rather than originating from one specific commodity market. For Enuit, this helps it to stand out from competitors, but also means the business can withstand the ups and downs of individual commodity market cycles.

“Not only was Entrade designed by a group of people with years of experience in the industry, but we all came from different backgrounds – some energy, some metals and so on,” he says. “So, when we started developing Entrade, we wanted to focus on building out the architecture and make a true multi-commodity CTRM.”