Fidectus' HUB Approach: Unlock the value in your Post Trade Operations

In today's fast-paced business environment, energy and commodity trading companies, in particular their back-office, must constantly seek ways to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve their bottom line. Back office employees frequently encounter challenges such as data inaccuracies and human errors, resulting in manual and suboptimal back-office operations. Till today, most post-trade activities, such as detecting and resolving data inaccuracies, are carried out manually. This involves employees manually checking their trading systems and contacting counterparties via phone or email. This complex and time-consuming process to resolve disputes is largely due to the manual nature of back-office operations, which makes it prone to errors and inefficient.

On top of that, back-office teams often have multiple channels of communication and varied workflows between companies and cross-departments. This makes it difficult to have an overview of processes and communicate with other departments or even internally within back-office teams. These challenges faced by the back-office teams not only diminish efficiency due to slow reconciliation, but also restricts their ability to carry out other value-added activities.
 
To overcome these challenges and unlock the value tied up in Post Trading operations, a comprehensive platform is needed. This platform must incorporate and automate all stages of the post-trade lifecycle – after Trade nomination till trade payment. Automating back-office tasks is the first step to unlocking the value tied up in post-trade operations. To achieve streamlined and automated workflows, the platform must be designed to connect with any counterparties regardless of their communication channel or document format. This full reach allows users to reconcile and communicate with counterparties through a single, unified workflow. This HUB approach enables users to achieve complete automation with all counterparties. True automation not only reduces the need for manual intervention during reconciliation, but also increases the reconciliation speed, while ensuring reconciliation quality. As a result, the back-office would be able to collaborate seamlessly, and decrease the risk of errors, resulting in a more efficient and effective back-office process. 
 

Fidectus GEN Hub

With these expectations in mind, Fidectus developed a solution service called the Global Energy Network (GEN). The GEN platform acts as a “hub” for post-trade processes and covers all the different parts of the OTC post-trade life cycle. The GEN platform combines all post-trade services, such as Confirmation Matching (including EFET eCM), Settlement Matching (incl EFET eSM, ISDA), regulatory reporting, trade financing, and payment services into a single platform reaching all counterparties. 
 
The HUB approach is a comprehensive and integrated solution that offers users a complete view of their back-office operations and a streamlined workflow across departments and companies. By automating and standardizing workflows, back-office employees can quickly identify and address exceptions that require manual intervention, rather than dealing with inconsistent processes that vary between electronic and manual workflows. This end-to-end automation and streamlined approach can significantly increase efficiency and reduce credit and counterparty risk. GEN also frees up staff to focus on other value-added tasks by reducing manual intervention. With GEN, document reconciliation takes seconds rather than days, creating a foundation for flexible trade financing options and liquidity management.
 
Automation and associated benefits are only achieved if your counterparty has an automated process. Being able to reconcile and match with your counterparties is only truly beneficial when you are not dependent on the document format of your counterparty. This implies that whether your counterparties use paper or electronic documents, it shouldn't impact your ability to reconcile and match with them. As Fidectus’ GEN is standard compliant with industry standards like EFET, the platform is interoperable with different service providers. It uses routing functionality, meaning it can reconcile automatically with counterparties, even if they use different service providers. The interoperability & routing capabilities of GEN HUB allows for users to have a full market reach, enabling users to be more efficient in communicating and collaborating with all parties, subsequently leading to faster settlement times, increased liquidity, and improved operational efficiency. 

To be able to profit from these benefits and unlock the value, easy and quick integration is crucial. This is why GEN HUB provides easy and flexible integration options to all of its services, Ranging from CSV-Import, multiple native vendor interfaces to an Restful API. This gives energy & commodity trading companies the opportunity to integrate in a way that would fit their internal IT architecture.

By adopting a comprehensive platform such as Fidectus' GEN HUB, companies can streamline their back-office operations, and achieve a more efficient post trade process. As the business landscape continues to evolve, it is imperative that companies keep pace with the latest technological advancements to remain competitive. By utilizing a platform such as Fidectus' GEN, companies can position themselves for success in today's rapidly changing business environment.