Successful Nigerian energy commodity trading company Linetrale has equipped itself for an aggressive expansion throughout West Africa by deploying AspectETRM, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) trade and risk management solution by Aspect Enterprise Solutions.

A user since 2004 of AspectDSC, the online real-time prices and news portal, Linetrale has upgraded to AspectETRM, adding real-time deal capture, position keeping, logging and reporting.

The move makes Linetrale first of the major West African trading houses to cease spreadsheet-based trading and move to wholly electronic AspectETRM. The deployment will later extend to include AspectETRM’s back office functions too.

Peter Malcolm King, Linetrale business development and strategy manager, says the move to AspectETRM supports a key strategic goal. “We were founded by Nigerians with a wealth of experience in international oil and gas markets, and that positioned us well for a remarkable run of organic growth. However we’d reached a point where we knew we had to tighten up on our internal processes and that we were at the limit of what was possible with spreadsheets.

“AspectETRM was installed and working for us so fast – quickly enabling us to get a real-time understanding of profit and loss, exposures, price movements in the markets and how we can better manage risk. It’s a cornerstone of our plans to grow our presence in neighbouring states such as Abidjan (CIV), Ghana, Republic of Benin, Cameroon, Liberia, Congo and Angola.”

The any-to-many scalability of Aspect’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.
Aspect Enterprise Solutions provides enterprise class market information, trade and decision support tools for energy, metals and commodities professionals. The company delivers near real time position keeping, risk management, market prices and intelligence to users virtually anywhere, anytime. Trusted by over 500 corporations in more than 80 countries, the company's solutions routinely support more than $10Bn of transactions every day. They go live quicker, fit more exactly and deliver greater ROI yet cost far less to implement than first generation offerings. Visit http://www.aspectenterprise.com for more information.