Steve Hughes, who heads CTRM software company Aspect, has been named the sector’s CEO of 2016 by Wealth & Finance Magazine.
Made as a result of a combination of votes from readers and the magazine’s in-house researchers, the award notes that under Hughes’ leadership Aspect has emerged as the sector’s disruptor, changing the way global trading operations approach trade and risk management and taking market share from larger legacy CTRM vendors.
Aspect has overturned the legacy CTRM model of on-premises IT infrastructure and software licenses with a new approach based on a simple a subscription-based Cloud-hosted service accessed through desktop and portable browsers.
Deployment timelines under the old model were typically measured in many months or longer. With Aspect’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model deployment times tumble to weeks and in some instances just a few days, with cost of ownership falling accordingly.
Initially Aspect focused its sales efforts on mid-tier trading houses unable to afford the costly legacy model and still relying on cheap but unreliable spreadsheets to aid tracking of trades. But sector confidence in the security and integrity of the Cloud has grown, and Aspect has gained a reputation for benchmark functionality and much lower costs. The company has long-time major-league customers like Trafigura and Mitsubishi, and in the last few months has signed multiple international firms including Hess, BP, MENA Energy, Klesch and Gulf Petrochem. In 2015 Aspect grew sales of its AspectCTRM solution by 71% over the previous year.
Accepting the Wealth & Finance Magazine award, Hughes said: “The commodity trading industry is under tremendous pressure right now with shrinking lines of credit, regulatory changes and the ultra-low price of many commodities. However, each of these pressures drive new clients to our solutions. We are in the right place at the right time… by design.”