Allegro Targets Metals, Raw Materials and Mining
A couple of weeks ago, Allegro announced its entry into the metals & mining space. Timed to coincide with LME week, the announcement rounded out a year of intense work to ready Allegro Horizon for the specifics of the market, Brian Collins, MD Metals for Allegro told me today. The initial focus for Allegro has been identifying the specific additional requirements to meet the needs of the metals and mining market followed by a period of development effort in order to ready the product. Being a cross commodity CTRM solution, much of what was required to support metals was already in the Allegro platform, he told us.
The early development work was focused on refined metals and LME specifically with enhancements made to handle warrants, inventory and other LME-specifics, Mr. Collins said. The product is currently capable of meeting the needs of those engaged in derivative trading and hedging on LME/CME/SHFE, refined metals logistics, inventory management, trading and so on. However, by the end of 2018, Allegro will have its design and prototypes ready for concentrates and raw materials. The development efforts in 2019 will focus on building out that functionality and also leveraging the advanced FEA analytics functionality in areas where more complex analytics are required such as contact optionality, assay optimization and so on. As Mr. Collins described it, Allegro has gone from zero capability to a fully-fledged solution for refined metals in less than 12-months and will next year release a complete metals, mining and raw materials offering.
He also is bullish about Allegro’s prospects reporting a lot of interest and several opportunities in progress. “I am excited at the prospect of adding metals clients to the Allegro portfolio by the end of the year,” he told us. “Next year is about consolidating everything, placing Allegro on the map as a supplier and ensuring that Allegro is fully geared up to deliver and support the solution.”
Allegro are not the only new entrant into the metals & mining CTRM space which has had a limited set of choices in the past. In recent years and months vendors such as ION Aspect, Commodities Engineering, G10, FIS Kiodex, InstaNext and others have also developed metals functionality and gone to market. Others are also looking at the market where Brady, PLC, ION Openlink, SAP and one or two others have historically played. Although the smallest of the three major CTRM markets (energy and Ags/Softs being the others), there does appear to have been more demand in the industry for solutions in recent months due to a need to modernize aging legacy solutions and perhaps due to the increased volatility and risks there as a result of geopolitical and other factors.
