CTRM Acquisitions Heating Up
Announcements by Triple Point and OLF over the last week regarding their acquisitions show that the CTRM landscape is once again heating up.
These acquisitions fit into two trends that CommodityPoint has alerted its readers to over the past 24-months. First, commodity markets are changing and many trading firms now trade multiple commodities and not just limited to a commodity group such as energy, metals or ags. We have remarked on the convergence and growing relationships between the various commodity groups and the leading CTRM vendors in the space have observed the same trend. In essence, these acquisitions expand their commodity coverage and, as importantly, incorporate the physical side of different commodities such as operations, logistics and tracking.
The second trend is one of considering the entire commodity value chain – meaning not just looking at price risk around a trade but looking at the entire breadth of a transaction including shipping/movement, credit, operational issues and so on. To do this demands a more integrated cross commodity platform with both the financial and physical sides of the trade covered.
As we have observed this last two-years, these trends reflect changes in commodity markets which in turn are impacting user requirements for CTRM software.
