Ovlas SA, a subsidiary of West African downstream petroleum conglomerate MRS Group, has become the third regional trading house in two months to adopt Aspect ETRM, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) -based trade and risk management solution from Aspect Enterprise Solutions.

The Ovlas move to Aspect ETRM, following Cirrus and Linetrale, underscores the unique way in which Aspect’s Web-delivered solution is enabling regional players to meet the particular risk, reward and financing challenges of the fast growing and complex West African market.
 
The deployment is the latest step in a relationship between Ovlas and Aspect that began in 2003 when the then just-created trading house chose Aspect’s OILwatch global energy and commodity information service. Five years later, as its trading volume passed two million metric tons, Ovlas upgraded to Aspect’s TradeFlo, adding P&L and VaR to real-time market prices.

“Moving from OILwatch to TradeFlo and now Aspect ETRM has been a natural progression for us,” says Jerome Arbet-Engels, Ovlas. “West Africa is a vibrant market, but to be successful it requires us to have end-to-end visibility of inventory and an ability to share that knowledge enterprise-wide. Aspect’s right-for-purpose solutions and its commitment to the West African market are significant elements in the strategy to grow MRS Group into a long-term major regional player.”
 
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 often fail to effectively scale downwards to support smaller trading operations. Even in a large scale fully end-to-end implementation, key elements of Aspect ETRM, 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.

Ovlas operates throughout Africa, Europe and North/South America, and is also active in the regulated and non-regulated derivative markets.

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. For more information see http://www.aspectenterprise.com.