White Papers One for all, all for one | Page 7

UNUS PRO OMNIBUS, OMNES PRO UNO
A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
AGIBOO’S APPROACH
A vendor that adopted this approach in the last few years is Agiboo. Led by seasoned professionals
from the physical commodities industry that had a wide set of experiences installing and
implementing various legacy CTRM solutions, Agiboo was founded because they thought there
had to be a better way to do it. Its solution is called Agiblocks. It supports both trade management
and financial management from the same source of data and within the same application. Its
modular structure allows users to implement an end–to-end solution or to select individual
functions to implement only the functions that they need. The philosophy behind its design has
been to provide the specificity that users need for a specific commodity out of the box.
Agiboo’s CTRM isn’t limited to a single particular
commodity however, but it is focused on a group of
commodities that it has extensive experience with
trading including cocoa, coffee, sugar, dairy, grains,
vegetable oils. For each of these commodities the
business logic and processes needed to manage it
effectively are embedded in Agiblocks and its modular
design allows more commodities to be added whenever
needed. What this means though is that it includes
specific functionality for specific commodities that
are often missing from more general legacy CTRMs
including for example,
• Ratio hedging for cocoa – Specific to cocoa is the
need to hedge ratios, default.
• White premium trading for sugar – this premium is
based in the differences between the rates of raw
and white sugar.
• From container loads to bags or boxes for coffee and
nuts – while specialty traders may buy in container
loads, they will sell in bags or boxes.
Though these may seem like small areas of functionality,
to add them to an existing CTRM is a major undertaking
as that the functionality needs to work across the system.
For example, in position management reporting, for
hedging purposes where traders need to hedge small
quantities of commodities individually; both currencies
and terminal markets, where it impacts pricing, price
formulae and so on. Adding a small area of specificity for
a commodity has huge ripple effects across the entire
solution that also need to be considered.
To get a bit further into this specificity for a commodity,
let’s consider coffee which has specific characteristics.
For example, the physical characteristics of coffee can
include origins, screen sizes or the amount of black
and broken beans. Quality parameters such as grades,
certifications and flavor patterns are also important in the
physical trade. An additional complexity is that terminal
markets are denominated in different units of measure
(MT and LBS) to the trading and merchandising side
that is based on MT, LBS and Bags. Add to this that
coffee trading practices are different in different
geographical regions and vary with the type of trade
being performed by merchandise companies (shipping
bulk coffee’s versus shipping bags of specialty coffee).
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2020, All Rights Reserved.