ActiveViam Targets Commodities Trading & Risk with its Atoti Platform
Recently, we got a briefing and short demonstration from ActiveViam of its Atoti software. ActiveViam has quite a presence in the FinTech space with over 100 clients globally. With some of these clients active in the commodities space, it is now looking to energy specifically as a potential growth market and it wanted to alert us to its capabilities that it thinks suits it to the space. Those capabilities include the ability to handle huge volumes of data and high frequency updates, to provide a consolidated view across the enterprise, ability to drill down to the most granular data, provide explanations and identify causes and more besides, they told me.
Atoti is a platform of solutions ranging from front office and market risk through to corporate finance. It ingests data from multiple sources – CTRM’s, ETRM’s and so on – and then via dashboards provides configurable and personalizable views on the data with complete drilldown capabilities. It performs real-time aggregation of data, features in-memory analytics, event-based real-time calculations such as Taylor approximation of PnL and MtM. This means it allows users to actively monitor activities and risks across a variety of disparate platforms in a single platform, for example, event driven real-time positions through the day using Taylor approximation. It also provides a single source of truth for users on this data.
Essentially, it is what we have termed a risk aggregation platform and in addition, a risk management toolset. ActiveViam provided details of three case studies in electric power and natural gas along with a demonstration that ran in real-time despite staggering data volumes and data capture – for example 34 million data rows and 600 trades/minute being captured. It is “a high-performance in-memory solution designed to consolidate high volumes and high frequency of updates,” they told me. Not only that, but they say it features rich APIs for integration and is not a black box, but fully transparent and configurable as the user’s desire. It can also be deployed on premises, in the cloud, or containerized as preferred.
Right now, ActiveViam has just a small number of commodity users, but among them is a large French energy company, Engie, as well as one of the largest global commodity trading firms. This means that its initial focus has been on electric power (and 15-minute trades), natural gas and oil. Typically, for firms coming into commodities from financial markets, power is the last thing they get started with as it is simply too granular and too much volume. ActiveViam started with power. The platform has competitors like RadarRadar, for example but, at the moment, there is little to no overlap in terms of the commodities the two vendors target.
Undoubtedly, this sort of platform and its capabilities will be of considerable interest to commodity trading companies that face new geopolitical risks and need to take a more active view on monitoring risk. Increasingly, these firms also want an easier way to understand why changes occur in the risk profile for a portfolio as well and ActiveViam’s platform provides tools to aid with this. Ostensibly, this platform appears to be very well aligned with the commodities market and we will check back with them in 2025 to see how it is going.
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