Orchestrade has been around since 2009 and today has more than 40 customers and around 100 staff. In 2017, it began a collaboration with Engie after a successful Proof of Concept and it has now brought a comprehensive and state of the art ETRM solution to market, according to Dale Emmerson of Orchestrade. The solution supports a wide range of commodities including physical and financial gas and power (including intra-day power), certificates, financial crude and products, financial coal, financial freight, and weather derivatives and is capable of capturing “very high trade volumes across hundreds of users.” It is also capable of handling complex PPAs and structured trades and uses high levels of automation to aid the user experience along with STP market connectivity to 140 markets out of the box, he told me. So, I was intrigued and excited to get a demo of the solution. Currently, the ETRM solution is used by Engie and an energy hedge (carbon) fund. Despite looking at many existing ETRM solutions on the market, Engie were attracted by the technical platform and speed of development, he told me. It also features multi-threaded grid computing for performance.
The screens look as one would expect, which is a positive, for sometimes vendors coming in from outside of energy and commodities lose potential interest by not looking quite right or as expected. This includes recognizable deal blotters and highly personalizable and configurable screens and reports. The solution is real-time so as soon as a trade is captured and booked, its impact is instantly available across the system. Every screen allows significant right click functionality and all allow drill down. My only critique of the UI would be the lack of graphics. It is very much a traditional text driven front end though it does have native integration to excel for charting.
All base data comes included with the system and it is set up to handle many different types of trades out of the box. However, users can build their own complex deal entry screens as well complete with support for highly complex price formulae that can be set up for settlement and fixings as well. I was shown one swap deal, for example, with 24 different pricing components. Being a risk system by origin, it includes all the detailed risk measures as well including Greeks, as well as all of the instruments you would expect.
Other functionality includes an integrated document generation module, complete and exhaustive audit trailing, trade allocation for hedge funds, support for all forms of master agreements and a configurable and powerful workflow module allowing event-based triggering of calculations and actions with graphical representation of the workflow. It is connected to Equus for confirmation matching and regulatory reporting if required, and it fully supports PPAs where optionality is identified and valued. It includes comprehensive market risk including stress testing but is lighter on the credit side. In short, it is a fully functional solution as advertised. From a technical standpoint, it can be deployed in the private or public cloud or on site.
Overall, it is a solution that will compete effectively in the market. It is also modular allowing people to take just the parts of the solution they want and need thus potentially expanding its ability to compete. The solution is included in the 2022 CTRM Sourcebook where prospective buyers can compare it to other ETRM solutions, but Orchestrade is a new entry into ETRM that has legs. We will now watch with interest to see if the vendor is able to fulfil the solutions potential in the market.
