Software as a service (SaaS) ETRM vendor Aspect Enterprise Solutions (AES) is to deliver a keynote paper at ARA Week 2010 on how SaaS front-to-back-office systems are African traders’ easiest and fastest route to compliance with the new accounting and credit paradigm.

At ARA Week - the African Refiners’ Association downstream oil conference in Cape Town  - AES will use real-world examples to illustrate the presentation. The company has won a remarkable series of deals in West Africa over the last six months as regional traders move from paper to on-screen systems in response to tightening regulations and a need to better secure lines of finance.

“SaaS solutions like our own AspectETRM scale like no other, so they suit from the smallest to the largest trading house, and they install and go live at an unprecedented pace,” says AES CEO Steve Hughes.

“SaaS means trading houses under pressure to comply with new accounting rules, and to show banks that they have a tight grip on their trading position and risk assessment and are therefore responsible and credit-worthy, can do so quickly, for a low start-up cost, and with minimal disruption. Of all vendors, we have probably greatest depth of experience in this difficult area and we will be sharing it with ARA delegates in Cape Town.”

The any-to-many scalability of AES’s SaaS solutions and the speed with which they can be deployed contrasts dramatically with legacy systems which typically take a year or more to implement and which fail to effectively scale downwards to support smaller trading operations. Even in a large scale fully end-to-end implementation, key elements of AspectETRM, such as deal capture and risk analysis, can be in place, working and delivering value within a matter of days, with successive additional elements going live as the progress of integration projects allows.