Igloo Powers Brady’s Short-Term Power Ambitions
Last October, Brady acquired Igloo and in that same month, we spoke with CEO, Bernard Delahaye who told us, “Brady has decided to invest in building a new program with PowerDesk, supplemented via the acquisition of Igloo, to provide a modern ETRM platform onto which it can migrate some heritage IP. Igloo was also built with intraday power markets in mind and its combination with PowerDesk will provide an all-new type of ETRM plus short-term trading solution for today’s energy markets.” It had been quite some time since I had seen Igloo in action and so last week, Brady gave me an update and demonstration of the solution.
The first thing to note about Igloo perhaps is that it uniquely handles some of the specifics required by commodity trading hedge funds as it started out in the hedge fund side of things. This functionality is very useful as it allows segmenting of trades, profits, expenses and so on by account or similar. This functionality works nicely for those working with DMA providers, for example, or possibly for DMA providers themselves. The second thing to note is that it is a new entrant and built on all modern architectures and software as a true SaaS offering. This means that it is affordable, agile, quite easily set up for use and maintained.
At the beginning of 2021, Igloo made quite a number of sales to a wide range of new customers, Tim Harrison told me. “These included hedge funds trading cross-commodity, physical asset optimizers, and a north American hedge fund entering the European Energy markets, requiring us to extend Igloo’s oil trading derivatives capability and its range of European power locations (into Eastern Europe and Nordic regions).” Brady sees itself as offering the market a choice of solutions determined by requirements, be it financial trading with Igloo, short-term power trading with PowerDesk, power scheduling with EDIS, or a combination.
The demonstration showed me a quite impressive array of functionality across a lot of areas including things like live PnL, strong curve handling functionality that extends into shapes and profiles, strong workflow, a lot of post trade capabilities, settlements, brokerage and so on. The UI is heavily personalizable and very graphical allowing drill-down and inspection of the data. “Our approach is to try to build in transparency and simplicity,” he told me. With sophisticated customization abilities, the solution allows limits, positions and more to be live and inspectable. Igloo is a capable multi-commodity ETRM solution with FX support. It also allows trading via market connections including OTC trades via Trayport direct from the Igloo screen. Igloo’s extensive connectivity includes all the major European power and gas exchanges as well as other trading platforms.
All in all, the Igloo platform is well positioned in our opinion in the European physical short-term power space and can handle its users trading in areas like gas, oil and so on as well. With PowerDesk alongside it, it could make for a formidable solution set in the lower and middle tiers of physical power in Europe and beyond offered as SaaS in the cloud.
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