Commodity desks have long been bastions of old-fashioned ways of doing business at investment banks, with salespeople quoting prices to clients by phone or instant message, even as other parts of the fixed income, currencies and commodities (Ficc) business have gone increasingly electronic.

That could be about to change, though, as a growing number of US and European banks have begun to offer electronic execution of over-the-counter energy derivatives. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Societe