Our CEO, Jan van den Brom, recently spoke with Dr. Gary M. Vasey from CTRMCenter. You can read a snippet of that conversation in this blog post. You can read the complete article here.
There is no doubt that the market for CTRM and related software is hot this year. Almost all vendors report significant activity and signings in almost all geographies and commodities. Agiboo’s Jan van den Brom says that he hasn’t seen this level of CTRM demand since he entered the commodities business back in 2000 and he believes that it is down to the volatility, a backlog created by the COVID lockdowns and, in ags & softs anyway, less choice for buyers. “It’s difficult to find a system that is both mature enough to have a broad range of functionality and yet is based on a modern technology stack and available in the cloud,” he told me.
Mr. van den Brom’s observations seem reasonable to us as we see what can only be described as the perfect storm of issues driving demand for CTRM software. However, in the ags & softs space, it does seem that buyer choice of a business viable and cloud-based platform is very limited. Many well-known platforms are aging and based on legacy technologies and, while there are some new entrants, these are very early and lack the functional footprint many buyers’ desires. This does seem to be something unique to ags and softs as in both energy and metals, we do see what we believe to be an increase in choice.
