FIS – Re-Organised for Energy Success
I recently spoke with Irina Reitgruber and Alberto Coltro of FIS to find out a bit about their plans for 2022 and how things were going. Apparently, there has been quite of lot of reorganization and refocus over at FIS and Alberto was appointed head of European sales for energy as a part of that reorganization. He is based in Europe, and he told me that going forward, FIS wants to have more impact on the European ETRM markets to build on the good presence and success it has experienced in the US. The organization now comprises of a single team for all energy software products, he told me. That includes a local European team. “We took people from different parts of the organization and focused them on energy including people from our data side and so on,” he said.
Right now, Alberto sees good opportunity for FIS to get engaged with customers and prospects. “With the price volatilities we see in the market, we believe that better portfolio management is one thing that people are keen to procure,” he told me. “We are seeing a lot of activity in that regard from energy firms who are often new entrants that came to market 5-years ago and are now consolidating and growing.”
FIS is focusing on a couple of products for energy that include FIS Energy Trading, Risk and Logistics Platform (formerly Aligne) for larger and more mature energy companies, FIS Energy Portfolio Manager (formerly XDM) as a portfolio management solution for smaller energy firms and XDM Select at the bottom end. It is also marketing Adaptiv as a fully functional risk solution into energy and commodities as well. The FIS Energy, Trading, Risk and Logistics Platform is described by FIS literature as a “highly configurable, flexible and modular multi-commodity software solution suite that integrates physical and financial trading, risk and operational control with credit, fuels procurement, emissions, back office, and advanced analytics.” The FIS Energy Portfolio Manager is defined as “covering front-to-back trading for power, gas and emissions including scheduling for power and gas as well as decision support tools for forecasting and optimization.”
One thing that FIS see in the market is the end of the regional ETRM solution. People active in the market will know that for many years there have been regional differences in markets and hence local ETRM vendors serving those markets. “With regulation and so on, markets are becoming more uniform across Europe now with greater standardization and homogenization of requirements,” Irina told me. FIS feel well positioned to off a pan-European solution that also incorporates carbon and certificates in the middle and top tier. Meanwhile, it is investing in greater scalability and in making functionality increasingly near real time for huge portfolios in Aligne. Irina pointed out that FIS would support intraday markets trading with real time calculations and positioning as well as other traditional ETRM functionalities and potentially cooperate with partners and customers on the algo trading side
FIS also feels well placed to respond to the entire carbon footprint, ESG and net zero requirements emerging rapidly across the industry. “FIS is supporting these initiatives generally with different products aimed at ESG, carbon and the ESG impact on credit ratings that can be applied into the energy side as well,” she told me.
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