VAKT’s vSure Roadmap will Deliver Digitalization Benefits to other Oil Markets

VAKT’s recent successes with vSure in terms of adoption and trade volumes, as well as its plans to enter new markets, was recently discussed with CEO, Tasja Botha. Ms. Botha had told me that “Now, we have achieved 70% adoption in the NW European barge market. We have proven that we can handle the barge market and give our customer’s a good ROI with our three software products.”  VAKT’s main focus is in “managing the entire post-trade physical energy lifecycle, primarily in oil, from one secure platform.” This growth is founded on good product management and focus according to Dale Becker, vSure Product Manager.  Dale took me through the product roadmap for vSure as we discussed VAKT’s recent successes highlighting key initiatives along the way.

An important foundation for vSure was the development of the similarity engine – which is the technology VAKT created to handle differences between systems and user trade capture habits, he explained. This key development allows vSure to match equivalent trades – one such example is where one party enters a trade with percentage tolerances while the other party enters it with tolerances expressed as absolute values, he told me. This has been in production for several months and has significantly reduced ‘noise’ for customers and greatly improved the use of the software. Additionally, VAKT has been working on a cross-pairing engine that will also soon be released into production to further help reduce ‘noise’ by matching trades booked differently by two parties. A simple example of that would be where one-party books a strip of three ICE trades of 2000 metric tonnes each while the other booked it as one trade of 6000 metric tonnes, he explained. These two developments have been key to furthering the roadmap and the use of the vSure product generally.

For example, an extension into the US oil pipeline market is on the cards. Here VAKT has been working with the US counterparts of its European customers to analyze the requirements in detail. “We established that it is a very small piece of work to have vSure work for US pipelines and that is on the roadmap,” he said. “We also looked at the vessel market in a similar way where we have had customers using vSure for vessels since the beginning of 2024. Again, some additional functionality is required as while vSure is capable of performing the matching, some ETRM’s lack the ability to capture optionality and price escalations forcing traders to either use comments fields or handwritten notes,” he said. “VAKT can use AI parsing in this use case to extract the required data.” Indeed, he says that VAKT has essentially solved this issue. “We solve real world problems for our users.”

Another area of the roadmap is VAKT Lite (vSure for off-VAKT users) for confirmation matching. “We have discussed this with many customers in the US and Europe and everyone likes the concept,” he said. “We just need a couple of enhancements to make this work well and these are also on the roadmap for 2024 delivery.” The VAKT Lite (vSure for off-VAKT) product allows clients to confirm and affirm trades with parties not currently on the VAKT platform.

Additionally, he says that VAKT has been able to unlock BIO trades in the barges market adding another feature that allows bio trades in that market to be confirmed under Argus terms.

VAKT vSure has also done a POC for customers for derivatives, he said, where VAKT had ingested transactions from two internal systems and successfully paired, matched and confirmed those trades meaning that this type of trade could also now be digitally confirmed and will completely remove the need for paper contracts. This POC functionality is in production and a small piece of additional functionality on the 2024 roadmap in this area.

vSure has changed considerably in the last 3-years, he said, and it is now a product that is maturing and ready to find new markets. VAKT has placed developments on its roadmap for this year to allow it to extend into the US pipeline market, the vessels market and add derivatives, among other initiatives.

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