CTRM Boom Times?
Yesterday, I talked to an old colleague who now works for one of the major consultancy/SI firms. He told me that his firm had recently elevated it’s CTRM focus to a global group whereas previously any CTRM focus had been regional or national. It was anticipating a boom time for CTRM and wanted to ensure that it had a true global focus and set of expertise available. He listed off a bunch of huge entities that he claimed were about to or already had RFPs and processes ongoing to select new CTRM Software. In fact, we have been hearing much the same from many of the vendors out there as well. It does appear that we are in what I might call a CTRM software supercycle!
For Patrick and myself, this is no real surprise. As the leading analysts in the space with a staggering 60+ years of experience between us, there are things happening in commodities that have had me call it the perfect storm and, all of these drivers mean that not only are firms need to modernize and upgrade their CTRM capabilities, but that the type of firm that might use a CTRM or related software is widening and exploding. Furthermore, we are seeing innovation in technology, architectures, delivery approaches, support mechanisms and even a services or BPO market emerging around SaaS software. It truly is quite the moment to be involved in CTRM.
Some of the drivers of all this activity are obvious and others not so much. Price volatility always creates opportunity and attracts investors, of course, so we see plenty of hedge funds, new trading forms and the like but the geopolitical situation being played out against a backdrop of a power struggle between (far) east and west is also creating extra demand. Swathes of new firms trading in commodities supplied by Russia, Iran and so on, often in non USD currencies and without ESG or netzero financing handcuffs, are also fueling the boom. On the other side of that, the drive to netzero in the west is also helping to fuel the boom as well as new firms are created, assets deployed, business processes modified and innovated and an entirely new set of businesses beyond the traditional wholesale commodity players are caught up in a need to manage their carbon footprints. Add to that, digitization, automation and optimization trends along with a renewed focus on data and risk management, and you have the recipe for a lot of activity.
Our recently issued CTRM Market Outlook gets into a lot of these drivers at a fair level of detail and addresses the growth in the market. Our new book – CTRM Software – An Analyst View of a Dynamic Software Market is also highly relevant in expanding on these drivers and their impact on the CTRM software market. We will be following all the developments with interest and as usual, reporting on them here.
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