Aspect: Transforming Business Operations for Trading Companies

Overview | Selected Company Profiles

Aspect: Transforming Business Operations for Trading Companies

As a significant prerequisite for successful active trading, most prosperous traders believe in strategically employing risk management solutions. “Having a holistic view of the company wide risk and ability to drill it down to lowest possible level is a basic necessity for any trading company. However, along with different commodities and products, if an organization has multiple trading desks spread across the globe, risk management depicts complexity in measuring it accurately,” explains Chetna Bhatia, CIO, Aspect.

Most of today’s Commodity Trading and Risk Management (CTRM) systems provide end-of-day processing for calculating risk as it is time consuming. “It is never real-time risk but always T-1 risk calculations.” Resolving these issues, Aspect provides a SaaS in-the-cloud based, real time risk management tool, which calculates profit and loss, exposure and Value-at-risk (VaR), within seconds.

Aspect’s flagship product, Aspect CTRM includes modules for trading businesses to make efficient trade decisions and manage trades through the supply chain. These components include trade, risk management, physical operations and financial operations management. Commodities support includes oil, petroleum products, metals, biofuels, coal, petrochemicals and agricultural products.

Further, AspectCTRM’s front-end trade and risk component encompasses market data and analytics, and which is sold as part of AspectCTRM, as well as a standalone product called AspectDSC. The firm delivers leading exchange prices and market sources to help traders make decisions through charting tools, historical and real time analysis. “AspectCTRM is one system, one code base for traders and risk managers across the globe,” says Chetna.

AspectCTRM is entirely web-based, providing different cloud hosting options—private and public, and offers IT-as-a-Service through the whole systems lifecycle. Aspect’s professional services team offers a range of services and support to ensure timely and cost effective implementation of AspectCTRM— from initial planning of the project through customization to full integration.

AspectCTRM is one system, one code base for all traders and risk managers across the globe

Through effective consultation and project management, and our SaaS architecture, Aspect’s solutions have immense capability to provide clients with a cost effective CTRM system that matches their specific business objectives, in record time.

Aspect customers gain enormous confidence in the decision making process, as AspectCTRM empowers them to perform intra-day risk calculations and real-time analysis. Further, as futures and spot prices are released in the market, it can be streamed into AspectCTRM to re-evaluate trades based on changing market prices. The solution captures and reports profitability from contract to settlement. The Indian refining and marketing subsidiary, Essar Oil Limited, has selected AspectCTRM to help them optimize their European refinery-related trading, supply and risk management activities. Other clients include Sumitomo, Mitsubishi, Trafigura, Aegean, Klesch and Gulf to name a few. Aspect has also built the Aspect Partner Program (APP) to exploit indirect channels to market and reduce industry cost. Most CTRM deployments start with approximately 70 percent standard solution and the remaining being customized according to customer’s business processes. To create standardization and tools that makes the whole process easier, AESthetics—an underlying framework is built into AspectCTRM. This framework enables clients’ consultants without professional services teams to easily customize by permitting access to the Aspect’s tools and platform through the APP.

“Though our cloud CTRM system is technically advanced, we still aim to continuously improve our technology and learning,” cites Chetna. Recently the company has invested heavily on its in house scripted tool that allows easy creation of web service API to integrate data to and from Aspect. The company desires to continue leading in the business with its newest vision for “Any Cloud”, which will give customers the choice of hosting of their CTRM-on the Aspect Cloud, private cloud or public cloud.