CTRM software house of the year, Asia: Enuit

Commodity trading and risk management (CTRM) vendor’s focus on future needs supports current growth of both client base and Asia‑Pacific (Apac) team over the past year

The Covid‑19 pandemic has not held back the continued growth of CTRM system provider Enuit, which has been named CTRM software house of the year, Asia, for the second consecutive year at the 2021 Energy Risk Asia Awards. The company has continued to add personnel and take on new projects across Apac region over the past year. 

Signing eight new deals over the past 12 months has led to an expansion effort by CTRM system provider, with 20 new hires in Singapore, Japan, China and in Enuit’s new office in India. The latter was opened in February 2021 with the initial aim of supporting global operations, but will eventually begin procuring new clients in India, according to Winson Low, deputy managing director of Enuit’s Singapore operations.

“With the additional projects, we have had to hire more people so that our team is well equipped to provide the necessary resources to clients,” Low says. These new hires consist of a mix of experienced CTRM professionals and new entrants to the industry. In relation to the latter, Low says Enuit is keen to train up new people with an interest in commodities. “As a market leader, we like to find and train new talent, in particular providing some hands-on experience – this is how we nurture our talent,” he says.

On the client side, Low has noticed a trend towards more tech-savvy business leaders, and Enuit has been adjusting its offering in response. “This has led to us adding more new developments to our solution, particularly in terms of making it more web-based,” he says. “We are trying to break away from the traditional ‘client-server’ energy trading and risk management space and instead move more towards providing web-based services via our platform.”

While Low is quick to stress this has not resulted in a change to Enuit’s core offering, it means clients can access a more interactive solution, particularly in relation to data visualisation and reporting capabilities. “We are seeing a lot of demand for business intelligence tools for reporting and graphical representations, such as Tableau,” he continues. “We have implemented some very interactive reporting tools in response, which were designed by our in-house developers, for our clients.”

Enuit’s core offering consists of a CTRM and a commodity management solution. The latter, Entrade Unite, was launched in early 2020. This platform combines a CTRM system with key elements of enterprise resource planning to allow users to integrate trading and risk data into their supply chain management functions.

Entrade 7.0 is the latest version of Enuit’s CTRM, which the vendor has developed with flexibility and ease of integration in mind. The web-based platform includes an intuitive user interface and provides mobile-based alerts and approvals capabilities.

Low says Enuit is now looking ahead, beyond the next five years, to developing cutting-edge solutions for clients, in addition to the current functionality provided by Entrade 7.0. This will include the integration of robotic process automation into the platform offering, as well as the development of machine learning capabilities for market analytics, and blockchain for logistics and settlement.

“Our developers are constantly looking at how to build new technologies and features into the platform for our clients – we call this ‘platform-as-a-service’,” he says. “So we are looking beyond, for example, this current pandemic situation to work out how our clients can use our solution more conveniently and intuitively, particularly as more people now work from home. We believe we should be improving on the delivery of our solution as a result, meaning more web-based features, micro services, better user interface, and so on.”

Cyber security is also a growing concern, particularly because of the significant shift to remote working taken up during the pandemic. According to Low, most requests for information Enuit now receives will contain some security questions relating to how secure Enuit’s environment is or if its data is encrypted. “We live in an increasingly connected world, so security is really important to our clients,” he says. “So, particularly when we are dealing with sensitive information, we want to make sure our clients’ data is protected.”

In June 2021, Enuit successfully completed its System and Organisation Controls 2 Type 1 examination, which entails a third-party assessment of its data security practices. The resulting audit report attests to the trustworthiness of services provided by an organisation, according to Low, and is often used to assess risks relating to outsourced software solutions that store customer data online.

“This will help us help our clients and it reinforces our commitment to their data security,” he says, adding that Enuit will continue to work on cybers ecurity with some additional certifications planned for the near future to ensure client data remains secure.

As such, rather than focusing on the current market fundamentals only, Low says Enuit wants to concentrate on the future to ensure Entrade users can continue to access cutting-edge technology and seamless updates that address the commodity industry’s evolving CTRM needs. 

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