Discover what ION can do for you
Join the largest community of commodity traders
Volatility in the commodity markets offers many opportunities and many risks. To succeed, companies must have sophisticated systems that not only transact and capture data, but also provide real-time business intelligence and analysis to optimize trading, logistics, and compliance decisions.
Value delivered
- Challenge
Improving time to market
In today’s competitive and volatile markets, companies need better visibility into market conditions, and the most complete and accurate information from within their own organization to make profitable trading decisions. Managing risk through properly structured hedges, while ensuring compliance with the appropriate regulatory measures, is critical. The ability to create optimal trading strategies, stress test, execute, and create the necessary reporting data through a single, unified platform is crucial for profitability and maintaining real-time volumetric and financial views of a company’s positions and risk exposure.SolutionTrade confidently in changing markets
ION offers fully integrated front-, middle-, and back-office systems, covering all aspects of confirmation, clearing, settlement, account reconciliation, and cash management. Our front-to-back systems support multiple asset classes across your business and handle high volumes of diverse instrument types. Our solutions are robust and flexible to take advantage of new market opportunities quickly, allowing seamless consolidation onto a single platform up and down the business. - Challenge
Real-time decision making
With significant commodity price swings in a matter of minutes, executing trading strategies quickly can mean the difference between huge profits or losses. To succeed in today’s global commodity markets, businesses need sophisticated systems that provide real-time business intelligence and analysis to optimize trading and logistics decisions.SolutionOptimize trading decisions
ION’s solutions enable fast decision making by providing real-time decision support across commodities and asset classes, covering physical and financial commodity trading. With functionality for contracting, trading, hedging, execution, settlement, and risk management, our end-to-end solutions ensure support for your entire business. By gaining real time visibility into your commodity positions, your business can make more confident trading decisions. - Challenge
Increasing frequency of major market disruptions
A single event—like an extreme demand decrease, supply shortfall, or price collapse—can put a commodity trading company out of business. In recent years, these “once in a lifetime” events have occurred more frequently. Effective risk management is the only way for an organization to survive and thrive in such an environment.SolutionEffectively manage risk and volatility
ION’s solutions enable businesses to manage risk effectively. Our tools show exactly where risks are across your business portfolio and the rate of change of those risks. This insight facilitates both preemptive actions before disruptive events occur and targeted, rapid mitigation actions after events occur. Depending upon the event, effective risk management often empowers businesses to capitalize on disruptions and gain customers from less prepared competitors. - Challenge
Managing increasingly complex physical supply chains
Worldwide demand for commodities continues to grow, primarily outside the traditional European and North American markets. Years of logistics optimization have led to highly efficient supply chains, but with strained capacity across most logistics assets. Supply chain disruptions are increasing in frequency and severity. All of this makes scheduling and managing logistics more difficult than ever.SolutionMore robust and cost-effective commodity supply chains
ION’s commodity management solutions help manage the physical supply chains across all major modes of transportation, including pipeline, vessel, barge, rail, and truck. Our solutions enable your business to manage your daily operations better. ION’s solutions also let you pre-plan for disruptions, enabling more rapid mitigation when they occur. In today’s challenging business environment, better supply chain management is a huge competitive advantage. - Challenge
Navigating systems
In a fast-paced trading environment, navigating through a system quickly and easily without having to switch between different programs can mean the difference between capturing and missing opportunities.SolutionCustomizable workflows and flexible modeling
Configure our systems to align with best practices. For further automation, workflows and interfaces can be customized to work the way your business likes to work, adjusting the solution to reflect your competitive advantage. ION’s solutions are easily streamlined to changing markets or your specific business model, offering unprecedented flexibility to get ahead of the competition. - Challenge
Managing vessel-borne logistics
Managing the transportation of commodities via vessel charters is becoming more challenging due to rising charter costs and increasing volatility. This is further complicated by IMO 2020 compliance and disruptive events like the Suez Canal blockage. If you use vessel chartering as a primary means to receive or deliver commodity products, active management of your chartering activities is critical.SolutionImprove the visibility and efficiency of vessel chartering
Softmar, ION’s vessel charting solution, equips you to manage your vessel chartering efficiently. It provides visibility into the location and status of the vessels transporting your valuable commodities. This information is critical when disruptions happen and you have to find alternate routes, sources, or markets for your commodities. Softmar also provides visibility into chartering costs, helping you to understand your cost structure better and find opportunities for savings. - Challenge
Old option and risk models with lessening validity
As new commodities are created, like sustainable fuels or new certificates, markets are often so thinly traded that they can be difficult to price and value accurately. On the other hand, derivatives trading and programmed trading have dramatically increased the volumes and volatilities of commodity trading, making it harder to determine where prices will go. The options and risk models that served well for many years are now less viable and can even increase risks.SolutionUpdate and improve your options and risk modeling
ION’s FEA solution provides a world-class option for risk modeling to help you deal with the increasing challenges in today’s commodity markets. Though traditionally used to model options and natural gas storage, FEA’s modeling features can also be applied to modeling the storage of other commodities. FEA can be integrated with existing commodity management systems or be used by itself and provide outputs in Excel. FEA provides access to sophisticated modeling without hiring a team of quantitative analysts.
