A Previse Systems Success Story – Norlys Energy Trading 🇩🇰

“Previse Systems rethinks the way ETRM software is designed – they have built a software that actually supports today’s trading patterns”

Michelle Rønne, Head of Back Office at Norlys Energy Trading A/S.

We have worked with other solutions in the past, and those solutions are not geared to handle the number of trades we are doing today. Today’s solutions need to be designed for many small trades rather than a few big ones.

The Previse Coral solution is very data and event-driven, so rather than spending human resources clicking around the system, the solution automates processes and allows us to only focus on exceptions.

Michelle, thank you very much for taking the time to share some of your impressions and experiences with the Previse Coral software with us and with other prospective customers of Previse Systems!

I have already mentioned performance and automation. A further important point to note is definitely the flexibility of the solution, especially around defining workflows: we are able to configure the system around our processes instead of being limited to following processes defined by the system. Previse Coral is incredibly generic here, it allows to fine-tune the workflows exactly as we need them, e.g. with features like the transition process and the partial locking of trades.

Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Historically, my experience is that we end up spending a lot of time changing the trade book or strategy on the trade. With the Previse partial locking, we can decide exactly what the back office needs to have locked for controlling and what is open for the front office to change.

Does that also extend to settlement processes?

Well, Previse Coral is designed with a settle date and a clearing date which allows us to model all the special rules from the clearing houses along with the exchanges. We know when the trade can be controlled based on when it will be cleared. This allows us to automate those processes.

We all know how difficult it can be to ensure that all trades that need to be controlled and settled on a given day are handled, because of all of the special rules given by the clearing houses and exchanges. So instead of setting up a very complex filter or query (which is impossible to maintain) we can simply select by yesterday’s clearing and settle date and this gives us the definitive list of items to be processed.

Has event-driven settlement automation supported you in optimising your processes?

Yes, absolutely. Since settlement is the final process of the trade, the numbers are always affected by the data upstream, and it happens that some of that data might be captured incorrectly. For example, the clearing broker could have a mistake on their side for the settlement date, or a manually captured trade could be wrong. In such cases, we just correct the data on the trade, and the settlement event engine triggers a re-settlement of the trade automatically – we can then just flip over to the Settlement screen after editing the trade, and the data is already updated and ready for settlement.

It’s amazing not to have to run a batch process or similar! You can just process the data much quicker than in other solutions I have worked with.