SquareFour’s Nova looks usable
I caught up with SquareFour again earlier this week for a short demonstration of Nova. Nova was one of a very small number of CTRM solutions that I had not seen in my almost quarter century working in energy and commodity trading software, so I was looking forward to seeing it. The solution is based around an older front end yet, the principals at SquareFour had told me that it was highly usable. So much so that they told me they had relied almost totally on word of mouth to promote the solution and that usability was a key selling point for it.
The software has a colorful interface and is very logically arranged. Right mouse clicks reveal significant functionalities available throughout and colors are used with purpose highlighting mandatory data items and indicating workflow and approval needs, for example. Anything may be exported to Excel with a click and each screen functions very much like an Excel sheet anyway. Totalization is available on all screens where needed along with some neat ways to total highlighted cells. I understand instinctively that the solution is easy to navigate and use especially for smaller entities who may be moving up from Excel to a commercial solution. Despite this, the principals are keen to remind me that this coming year will see a new UX developed and introduced just to modernize things a bit. One of the key screens in the solution is the linkage screen (buy-logistics-sell) and this comes with some basic but functional graphics and lots of functionality such that it becomes a central focal point for some users.
The menu is up the left hand side, and it is comprehensive in scope covering everything from trade capture, logistics, accounting, hedging, risk and so on. The system also does a good job of integrating documents which can be displayed easily on the screen along with the data. All documents are attached to the system and accessible. Additionally, the solution includes checks and balances on data entry to help reduce user error. They showed me areas like pricing and PnL and in all cases, the system was logical in how it worked with real-time updates and comprehensive functionality.
Plainly, in a demonstration like this, the idea is to give me a feel for the solution so it’s not a comprehensive demo. However, I must agree that the solution looks very usable if a little dated initially, though this is due to be resolved with a new version of the UI on a new technology to modernize the solution. What struck me was that you can see that twenty-odd years of thought has gone into Nova with the result that it appears quite slick, and they seem to have done the best job with the tools that they used. It certainly seems like a good entry-level solution for certain types of commodity trading businesses moving off spreadsheets, for example, on up into more sizeable firms. Indeed, Nova is used by several firms with in excess of 100 users each, they told me.
I will now be looking forward to an update later in the year when they have developed a new UI to see if they have managed to preserve the straightforward simplicity of the screens that does appear to make Nova look usable.
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