In a digital world, data is King, and while energy and commodities have been going through a period of digitalizing for the last several years, there can be no doubt that coming up with data management strategies has also played an important, if not critical, role in those strategies as well. Indeed, this was strongly emphasized in Commodity Technology Advisory’s disruptive technologies research over the last few years, where more than half of all of those questioned in the industry.

1. PUTTING DATA AT THE
HEART OF ENERGY
TRADING
WHITEPAPER
Sponsored by

2. A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
INTRODUCTION
In a digital world, data is King, and while energy and commodities have been going through a
period of digitalizing for the last several years, there can be no doubt that coming up with data
management strategies has also played an important, if not critical, role in those strategies
as well. Indeed, this was strongly emphasized in Commodity Technology Advisory’s disruptive
technologies research1
over the last few years, where more than half of all of those questioned
in the industry were planning on further investment in data management and data mining. This
was also where other new technologies like AI, for example, were thought likely to be applied for
data mining purposes along with the use of enhanced visualization techniques.
Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading
Since that report was issued, much has already
shifted due to industry events and drivers. Increased
price volatility, particularly in energy, because of
the Russia-Ukraine war and the current stage in the
ongoing energy transition, along with digitalization
and an increase in speed and data volumes around
automated trading, has only re-affirmed many of its
findings. Supreme among those would be the need
for reliable and up to the minute data to support all
trading and associated activities. Despite that, many
in the industry still struggle with data – either in terms
of being able to extract and utilize it from systems like
ETRM or CTRM or, being able to access it in the right
time frame and at the right quality.
Modern technologies have also meant that more data
is available and collectible than ever before. All forms
of data, both structured and unstructured, can be
usefully used in trading and risk management if it is
of sufficiently good quality and provided in a timely
manner. A lot of effort is spent identifying, collecting,
and processing all types of data from a variety of
sources by most trading or commodity-related
firms. While some data like weather and pricing,
for example, can be provided by data aggregating
services, other data sources are web content often
obtained via screen scraping, documents, images
and so on, that need proprietary methods to obtain,
cleanse, and utilize them. This is why there has been,
and continues to be, significant investment in data and
data management, whether that is in the form of data
lakes or sophisticated data management applications.
Given the increasingly real-time nature of trading in
many commodities and instruments, and given the
speed of change in markets, access to high quality
and timely data can make the difference between
profit and loss or, good and poor decisions. This paper
looks at those data management needs within trading
and risk in energy and commodities, and it specifically
examines FIS’s offerings.
1
https://www.ctrmcenter.com/publications/reports/disruptive-technologies-a-2021-update/

3. A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 3
CTRM – WHERE GOOD DATA GOES TO
DIE?
CTRM software or its energy commodity version – ETRM, is often likened to a hole in which
good data is placed but cannot be used outside of the pre-canned reports provided by the C/
ETRM. The CTRM can become a black hole insofar as where data is concerned despite the use
of a variety of tools like BI used to try to access and utilize that data. In addition, in the last few
years, the internet and regulations to promote openness and access to data, has meant that
there is more data than ever that is useful to traders, risk managers and others within the energy
or commodities enterprise. As stated above, that data now comes in all formats, structured and
unstructured but of course, a lot of it is in the form of time series data as well. This means that
data management has become a key aspect of business strategies and of digitalization efforts
in the industry.
Providing users with the ability to identify data sources
and then rapidly access them is now a key activity within
most energy and commodity firms. This isn’t limited to
price and weather data but can include a multitude of
different types and formats of data from proprietary
asset availability information on a website to satellite
imagery that allows estimates of crop yield, inventory,
and so on. Of course, much of this data doesn’t sit in the
C/ETRM at all, yet it is needed as back up or, input into
decisions and algorithms that are related to processes
recorded within the E/CTRM.
THE BASIC NEEDS OF A DATA
MANAGEMENT TOOL
So, what is it that is needed to manage and access data in the manner that many seek in energy
and commodities?
It is the ability to integrate with other systems – like
E/CTRM – as well as almost any form of data source
that has been identified. That data must then be made
available in a timescale that keeps it useful in a fast-
moving business environment while also allowing users
to cleanse, validate, and enrich the data automatically
via easy to set up rules and processes. It must also
provide the data in a format that is useful and allow
Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading

4. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 4
FIS OFFERS A COMPREHENSIVE
SOLUTION
FIS has successfully integrated and deployed a combination of its data management and
aggregation application – Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition FIS Market Data Analyzer- Energy
Edition formerly known as MarketMap Energy and FAME, with its E/CTRM solution - FIS® Energy
Trading, Risk and Logistics Platform across several energy and commodity firms.
FIS Market Data Analyzer- Energy EditionMarket
Data Analyzer- Energy Edition is its scalable big data
management solution that can be hosted in the cloud
offering users comprehensive and quality checked
market data coverage along with the ability to rapidly
add public or internal data sources and feeds. It affords
users the confidence that their market and fundamental
data is provided in a timely and quality fashion including
complete support for time series and derived curves.
It can easily be integrated with E/CTRM and other
solutions including FIS’s own E/CTRM.
FIS Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition includes the
provision of over 400 aggregated data feeds (including
over 250 exchanges) as well as extensive calculation
and visualization tools. FIS also manages many of the
data provider contracts so that users do not have to
worry about multiple contacts and invoices with/from
data providers. In addition, it is capable of web scraping
and on-demand data acquisition to provide a holistic
data solution. It is a modular solution that comes armed
with all the tools, workflow and alerting that users need.
Users have access to streaming, real-time and delayed
users to modify it via algorithms, calculations, rules and
so on while ensuring an audit trail of transformations.
Workflow is another important aspect of the solution –
not just in terms of setting up the acquisition, cleansing
and transformation processes but also to alert users
to its availability as much data is time sensitive. It also
needs to be able to handle huge amounts of data in
a timely manner without performance issues and to
allows visualization of the data in ways that aid users in
decision making.
Use of an effective and comprehensive data
management application not only helps eliminate a
lot of manual work with data including working with
spreadsheets, but it helps to eliminate additional errors
and costs. By being able to automate the acquisition,
cleansing and transformation of many sources of
data and make that data available to other users and
applications across the enterprise in a timely manner,
it reduces costs and risks and increases effectiveness.
The data is then consumed and utilized in areas like
risk, invoicing, settlement, position management and
hedging, contract, and counterparty management and
much more.

5. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 5
data, and the ability to rapidly integrate to consuming
systems like E/CTRM and, when combined with the
FIS® Energy Trading, Risk and Logistics Platform, it
affords users a rich and deeply functional platform that
being from one vendor, offers support advantages and
include 24 by 7, follow the Sun support.
FIS MARKET DATA ANALYZER - ENERGY EDITION PLATFORM
Custom Loaders
Charting, Analysis,
Formula, Advanced
Formulas, Data
Import, Data Export,
Data Validation,
Usage Reporting
Data Authorisation
Data Alerts, Curve
Building, Dashboard
Events
Framework
FAME Scripting Language
Market
On
Close
Out-of-the-box
Development
Interface
MarketMap
Real-time
5 Minutely
Snapshot
Rule-based
Validation
Data
Enrichment
Data
Notifications
Data
Design
Data Delivery
Alerts
Data Integrity
Service
Numeric
Time
Series
|
Big
Data
Universe
Numeric
Time
Series
|
Big
Data
Universe
FIS Market Data
Analyzer - Energy
Edition Modules
FIS Market Data
Analyzer Platform On
Cloud or On-premise
Managed Data 400+ Sources
Proprietary Data
Curves & Calculations
Web-based
User
Interface
Web-based
User
Interface
ITrader
Analyst
IT
Data
Manager
Planning
procurement
Back
Office
3rd
Party
Interfaces
• Time Series Storage
• Coupled Analytics
• Forecasting
• Relation Storage
• Full Text Search
E/CTRM
Systems,
Portfolio
Systems
SOAP
AUDIT
Several FIS clients have deployed this solution in areas
likeoilandgas,electricpowerandfinancialcommodities
trading to affect. In one instance, a major energy and
commodities company that trades millions of barrels
of crude oil and products every day required reliable
access to hundreds of public multilingual websites
for production, statistical, and logistical information to
reduce operational costs. Despite investing in a data
lake, they still could not solve the problem of acquiring
and maintaining the data from across 1,000+ public
websites and the Multi-lingual nature of the data sources
was a further complexity. By adopting FIS Market Data
Analyzer- Energy Edition Market Data Analyzer- Energy
Edition from FIS, the company was able to transform
energy, commodity, statistical and economic websites,
documents, and emails into high-quality data available
in near-real time and at end of day. They accrued some
serious benefits from this that included things like,
• Better and faster curve management for traders,
• Reduced operational risk,
• Reduced complexity and chance for errors,
• Reduced costs via a hosting arrangement,
• Ability to add new data feeds in the format that they
wanted.

6. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 6
THE BURDEN OF FUNDAMENTAL
RESEARCH
While trade data like prices, volumes, and so on, is relatively easily obtained in energy and
commodities via consistent feeds from any number of data aggregators, fundamental data can
be much trickier to handle. This sort of data involves items such as demand, supply, production,
consumption, seasonality, weather, shipping costs, storage capacity, traffic patterns and regional
trends, to name a few.
Most usually, these data are freely available on public
platforms and websites but, because of this, they are
neither stable, nor guaranteed. It often takes teams
of internal researchers and data scientists, scraping
websites, translating languages, reformatting inputs
and cleaning the data, to even begin to make it useful.
Then, no sooner do you have a good set of inputs
established, than one of the main feeds goes down, or a
new, better one comes up, and you have to start all over
again. This endless cycle typifies fundamental research
and it can consume countless hours.
Two other clients manage power grids. One of these
deployed the FIS solution to help manage meter data
that was coming in in huge quantities and needed to
be converted in to 5-minute increment time series.
The other struggled with a vast array of spreadsheets
holding data from multiple disparate sources. It used the
FIS solution to capture and store this data, manipulate
it to produce complex derived curves at different
granularities and make all that data available to a wide
range of analytical tools and applications across the
enterprise including with the FIS Energy Trading, Risk
and Logistics Platform.
A large integrated financial services group has also
deployed the solution successfully to transform market
data and trades coming in from variety of exchanges and
market data providers across a variety of commodities.
It also organized its market data and curve analytics
into a centralized server and the distributed it to its
Commodity Trading system and Risk Systems. It also
used data visualization and other analytical tools to
work with the data.

7. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 7
DATA AS A SERVICE: A BETTER
BUSINESS MODEL?
Energy and commodity companies looking for faster, more accurate insights across businesses
and functions, require access to high-volume, diverse sets of data, so that they can make informed
and timely decisions. It’s a cost of doing business that many firms simply absorb, yet it doesn’t
have to be that way.
Machine learning is a powerful way of extracting
knowledge from massive amounts of data and while
a great deal of machine learning research has been
focused on improving the accuracy and efficiency
of training and inference algorithms, there was less
attention paid to the important problem of monitoring
the quality of data fed. Errors in the raw data can
nullify any speed and accuracy benefits for training and
assessment. This argument points to the need for a
data-centric approach to machine learning that treats
training and serving data as an important production
asset, on par with the algorithm and infrastructure
used for learning. FIS Market Data Analyzer – Energy
Edition can address these challenges for you and lets
you focus on the machine learning and data science.
Thanks to data as a service (DaaS), the labor and cost
involved in transforming fundamental research into
useful insights can now be whittled down to a minimum
while also making the ongoing information stream a
whole lot more reliable.
Major energy and commodities companies trade
millions of barrels of crude oil or other commodities,
such has natural gas, power, agricultural products, or
metals and minerals, every day. They require access to
hundreds of public multilingual websites for production,
statistical and logistical information to reduce their
operational cost. As a cost of doing business, they may
choose to invest in a massive data lake, along with a
sizeable team of data scientists, to monitor more than
1,000 public websites that change, add and delete
in number every business day. The process can be
extremely complex and unreliable. The burden it
places on human resources and operating budgets can
become intolerable.

8. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 8
FIS’ Market Data Analyzer DAAS
SOLUTION
FIS works with major companies to shift their research operations to DaaS, offered by FIS Market
Data Analyzer- Energy Edition – and invariably, dramatic changes occur in very short order.
Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition establishes an
open pipeline to a complete fundamental research data
factory, supporting decision-makers with:
• Instantaneous access to 1,000+ feeds in preferred
formats
• Tens of new feeds added every month
• Better and faster curve management for traders
• Reduced complexity and cost by hosting the data
on FIS servers
• Reduced operational risk
• High-quality data supported by FIS’ energy and
commodity data experts.
With Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition, traders can
begin to predict markets with greater accuracy. Their
time to market can be reduced, as they begin receiving
quality research in timely fashion and eliminate the
extra work of maintaining individual custom curves for
every trader. By hosting their data with FIS, they can
add scale to their operations, and reduce OpEx relative
to infrastructure and infrastructure maintenance. And,
all the while, FIS domain experts ensure that their
quality of data remains high and on point, in line with
their stated business objectives.

9. Putting Data at the Heart of Energy Trading A ComTechAdvisory Whitepaper
© Commodity Technology Advisory LLC, 2023, All Rights Reserved. 9
SUMMARY
These real-world examples demonstrate how a proper
data management strategy can unlock the potential
of data from within and outside of the enterprise
affording competitive advantage, reducing the potential
for error and poor decisions, and reducing costs. This
is why data management is a key and critical aspect of
a digitalization strategy within energy and commodity
firms.
FIS’s data FIS Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition
Market Data Analyzer- Energy Edition allows users
to properly manage data from many different sources
quickly and easily with over 250 energy data feeds
and historical data provided out of the box. Available
hosted and in the cloud, and by combining it with the FIS
C/ETRM platform, the user benefits from working with
one experienced supplier that can provide superior
24 by 7 support. It can also be easily and readily
integrated with other E/CTRM solutions and a host of
other commonly used applications in use in energy and
commodity firms.
In a time of rapid change, multiple challenges and high
volatilities – not just in commodity prices but in FX and
interest rates as well, deploying state of the art data
management can make a world of difference in dealing
with the risks, opportunities and challenges in energy
and commodities.

10. FIS is a leading provider of technology solutions for
financial institutions and businesses of all sizes and
across any industry globally. We enable the movement
of commerce by unlocking the financial technology
that powers the world’s economy. Our employees
are dedicated to advancing the way the world pays,
banks and invests through our trusted innovation,
system performance and flexible architecture. We
help our clients use technology in innovative ways to
solve business-critical challenges and deliver superior
experiences for their customers. Headquartered in
Jacksonville, Florida, FIS is a member of the Fortune
500® and the Standard & Poor’s 500® Index.
getinfo@fisglobal.com
https://view.ceros.com/fis-global/market-data-
analyzer-energy-edition/p/1
To learn more, visit www.fisglobal.com. Follow FIS on
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter (@FISGlobal).
SPONSORED BY FIS

11. ABOUT
Commodity
Technology
Advisory
LLC
Commodity Technology Advisory is the leading analyst organization covering the ETRM and
CTRM markets. We provide the invaluable insights into the issues and trends affecting the
users and providers of the technologies that are crucial for success in the constantly evolving
global commodities markets.
Patrick Reames and Gary Vasey head our team, whose combined 60-plus years in the energy
and commodities markets, provides depth of understanding of the market and its issues that is
unmatched and unrivaled by any analyst group.
For more information, please visit:
www.comtechadvisory.com
ComTech Advisory also hosts the CTRMCenter, your online portal with news and views about
commodity markets and technology as well as a comprehensive online directory of software
and services providers.
Please visit the CTRMCenter at:
www.ctrmcenter.com
PO Box 1269,
New Waverly,
TX 77358
+1 832 687 4736
Prague, Czech Republic
+420 775 718 112
ComTechAdvisory.com
Email: info@comtechadvisory.com