Freight Investor Services, the global leader in freight and commodity derivatives has partnered with financial software developer KB TECH to launch a new platform for commodity derivatives.
The FIS Screen provides live prices and forward curves on some of the most liquid Physical FFA freight routes and fertilizer derivatives contracts, improving price discovery and simplifying trading.
The FIS screen has been developed to answer the need for a system that combines pricing and trade execution in these closely related commodity and freight markets, enabling full risk management across trading and logistics chain.
KB TECH worked closely with FIS to design and deliver a system that retains the broker at the heart of the trade process, enabling them to populate prices and execute trades for straight through clearing.
“FIS has a heritage as an innovator in the commodity derivatives markets, developing new asset classes and making them straightforward for participants to take advantage of,” says FIS Founder and Managing Director John Banaszkiewicz. “The FIS Trading Screen is the latest example our continuing mission to give our clients an improved level of access to a suite of products that can be traded alone or together for enhanced risk management.”
The screen provides key market lead functionality visible to all players in the market who can respond with changes to price or volume details. FIS brokers can circulate firm prices to their clients and use the portal as a central orderbook for trades executed on a ‘hit and lift’ basis.
“We worked with the FIS management and broking teams in an iterative process with strong internal testing, to develop a trading portal that can be used to deliver prices across the popular contracts in fertilizers, freight and grains,” says David Briggs, IT Director and co-founder of KB TECH. “For us the main driver was not to add a layer of technology but to enable FIS to provide increased business benefits together with operational flexibility and functionality to its clients.”
The system can process block trades with straight through processing to all major clearing houses including SGX, NASDAQ, EEX and CME, with functionality available to clients and brokers on the move through a mobile App. In 2018, KB Tech technology solutions have gone live for market players including EEX Asia who are part of the EEX Group and specialist Norwegian exchange Norexeco.