AspectCTRM Trade Management

The AspectCTRM suite captures physical and financial transactions performing straight-through-processing (STP) execution through to settlement and invoicing. It supports best practices in business processes for decision making across each step of the transaction life cycle with powerful reporting functions. The Trade Management Module is part of the front office module which also includes Risk Management for risk measuring, managing and reporting market and credit exposures. While many companies access trade and risk functions through our Standard and Enterprise Editions (EE), others access only the Trade Management functions via our Lite Edition (LE) which is designed for less complex requirements for small companies.

AspectCTRM’s Trade Capture Module has long been the industry’s leading solution with its real-time calculations and fast-action closing reports. This powerful application utilizes On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology to enable ‘slice and dice’ reporting for quick data analysis that allows you to see your P&L reports and trade scenarios from just about any view. Manage hundreds of thousands of transactions from deal entry through back-office settlement, and remove duplicate data entry. This module captures physical and paper transactions; integrates and streams pricing and analytical information; generates dynamic real-time position management and profit and loss calculations; creates instant marked-to-market computations for multiple markets, pricing instruments, products, and much more. You’re able to effectively monitor trader portfolios and corporate exposure as positions change simultaneously with market volatility. Additionally, drastically reduce the time it takes to produce intraday and closing reports to seconds rather hours or days, and never again start the day without an accurate financial picture.

Key Processes Supported Include:

• Comprehensive Deal & Price Capture
• Real-Time Profit & Loss Tracking
• Real-Time Market, Credit Exposure
• Historical Profit & Loss Tracking
• Credit Management
• Options Tracking
• Greek Calculations
• Broker Statement Reconciliation & Automatic Import
• Inventory Valuation: MTM Storage & In-Transit
• Contract Management
• Secondary Costs Capture
• Confirms & Reaffirms

Best Practices In Market Risk

AspectCTRM provides best practices for managing market risk with M-to-M of all transactions, valuations with time-stamping; P&L in real-time, daily with MTD, YTD and daily changes; and complete risk, exposure and VaR reporting.

Trade Capture Begins The Transaction Lifecycle

We recognize that capturing and managing transactions is often the most difficult management task in physical trading companies. To maintain a policy of T+0 or T+1 trade entry, and for single-point entry of trades (particularly physical trades) to meet the data requirements of all people involved in the trade lifecycle, a system must be both easy-to-use and feature-rich. AspectCTRM captures physical deals, associated hedges, exchange/FX deals and all secondary costs.

AspectCTRM Trade Capture Supports:

• Fast and easy initial data entry using tabbed entry screens to display and capture the minimum amount of meaningful data to register a trade. Templates can be used as required.
• Tabbed partitions in trade entry screens support the capture and management of other trade data (ie. operations, settlement) as trades progress through their lifecycles.
• The ability to assign deals to deal owners via data permissions.

Market Pricing Integrated With Transactional Activity

An enterprise information management strategy is critical in the success of leveraging a CTRM system due to the time sensitive nature and accuracy of changing prices being applied to transactions and portfolios. Most AspectCTRM customers also subscribe to our AspectDSC Market Data & Analytics solution. AspectDSC is the decision support center for traders globally who access futures and spot prices – and chart trends for multiple commodities from sources like NYMEX, ICE, Platts, Dow Jones, CBOT, LME and others. This provides a seamless transfer of market prices used to validate trades and update positions. With the push of a button prices are uploaded from AspectDSC throughout the trading day. Many companies are manually updating this information which causes errors. Also many times corrections are missed when prices are re-released to the market as price corrections. AspectCTRM also integrates with external market intelligence providers, but the advantages of linking AspectDSC to trades as the pricing intelligence of record are unparalleled.

Real-Time Positions And Profit & Loss Reporting

One of the most critical capabilities of a CTRM platform is the ability to accurately detail the company's portfolio from a physical and financial perspective. With AspectCTRM exposure reporting is intra-day and in real-time as market prices are updated. This gives enormous confidence to the decision making of traders using our AspectCTRM solution. Most vendor applications perform risk calculations over many hours at the end of the day.

As the trading day continues, AspectCTRM’s OLAP reporting tools are used to continuously update and monitor positions. P&L and positions are updated at the point of entry of each trade, so for client organizations that support T+0 or immediate trade entry, the goal of ‘real-time’ risk management is possible.

Fast-Action Closing Reports

Companies relying on AspectCTRM drastically reduce the time it takes to produce intraday and closing reports to seconds rather than hours or days, and start every day with an accurate financial picture of the entire organization. No other solution delivers reports in seconds.

Solution Benefits

• Monitor the value of mark-to-market, cash positions and P&L simultaneously with market fluctuations, and as deals are entered and updated. This empowering capability is surprisingly still out of reach for many energy companies using older technology or spreadsheets.
• AspectCTRM supports a daily risk reporting process for Middle Office and Risk Managers to assess activity from the previous trading day. A daily book close process is used to allow the system to automatically calculate daily P&L changes, MTD, YTD, etc. and to snapshot positions by strategy, book, location, trader, etc. A set of standard reports is published to facilitate the daily review.
• Aspect builds risk reports tailored to individual client corporations. For example, various versions of a daily report have been produced that provide a quantitative assessment of the various risks in each portfolio, with drill-down/drill-around functions to allow the identification of relevant events which give rise to sudden changes in exposure and position.
• Gain access to real-time profit and loss performance metrics, plus full transparency of costs and risks to eliminate threats and better manage trading performance.
• Improve transaction cycle times, visibility, time loss, and process management.
• Customize screens, set security limits on data, and view workflow and audit trails.
• Set workflow parameters and automatic notifications to align with business processes and provide visibility and audit trails for management.
• Reduce costs and errors associated with duplicate data entry and excess human resources.
• Share vital, real-time intelligence and put your offices in-sync for critical visibility and a complete financial picture of the entire operation.