A couple of weeks back, I talked with Colin Haywood, CEO of Chinsay. Chinsay is a specialist in contract data and has a singular focus on “contracts and removing paper from people’s desks,” he told me. It has just announced its cloud-native Intelligent Contract Platform (ICP), which it claims is “architected to make the best use of AI as it evolves, revolutionises the use of the latest technology, creating a totally new way to negotiate, capture and manage the full complexities of commodity contract creation and management. Working with major clients and commodities market professionals, Chinsay has developed the next-generation platform, bringing digitalization (the process of structuring data and extracting business intelligence) to the market and moving commodities firms towards paperless trade and blockchain-based initiatives.”
As Mr. Hayward describes it, the platform is focused on data in and around the issuing and drafting of contracts. “It’s more of a data capture platform to help gain insights into contracts,” he said. “Much of the commodities market is still relying on manual contract creation and expensive legacy systems. This is not sustainable in today’s low-margin, highly-competitive climate. ICP creates an undisputed ‘Golden Copy’ of the contract in the form of a digitalized contract data set. This results in immediate cost savings, increased efficiencies, improved security, along with broader risk identification, management and control. Our clients are able to identify real-time market, counter party and organizational trends enabling behavioral analysis and visualization across the enterprise, which is an industry first in commodities.”
ICP is fully able to easily integrate with risk management, accounting, legal and operational functions to provide a seamless, fast and efficient contract creation workflow and approvals, one-time data entry and minimal legal discovery costs.
Chinsay, he told me, is an independently-owned Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for the end-to-end administration of contracts in the global commodities and freight markets. It was founded in Stockholm, Sweden by a shipping industry veteran. It has around 25 staff and is growing rapidly. It offers the Intelligent Contract Platform (ICP) and Recap Manager (RM) which are designed to standardize the process of creating, validating, archiving and sharing commodity & freight contracts. It’s solutions are used by multinational corporations, brokers, and commodity traders in over 40 countries. For Mr. Hayward, “collaboration is the key,” and users can work together on its platforms to gain more value in the process.
For ComTech, Chinsay is another example of the impact of cloud and services in the cloud on the broader commodity industry. We envisage a future in which users will select discrete applications that deliver deep and powerful vertical or broad horizontal domain expertise in the cloud and link them in an ecosystem using API’s. These will be collaborative in the supply chain to optimize and increase efficiencies there. Both Eka and Gen10 are overtly pursuing such a strategy and other vendors are coming to market with applications and/or services for a variety of other needs from Tradesparent’s risk reporting overlay in gas and sorts to CTRMCloud and the new tolling service from Brady, for example. For us, Chinsay fits into this model or vision providing commodity and freight contract expertise and collaboration.
