The New Standard for Nonstandard Transactions

Today’s OTC Energy Markets

Highly customized, nonstandard bilateral energy products are, by definition, more complex than standardized ones.  Often energy market participants find that today’s bilateral transactions are time consuming, inefficient, expensive, and fraught with burdensome audit challenges.  In many ways, bilateral transactions have NOT materially evolved in the last 30 years in the way other OTC markets have matured and become less manual.  The inefficiency of using a host of different media (phone, fax, mail, IM, email) to publish, negotiate and respond to deals has created significant and costly challenges for the front, middle and back offices.  Additionally, many firms maintain significant marketing budgets to develop and maintain counterparty relationships and spend additional time and resources to increase deal velocity.

Though e-mail and instant messaging have partially automated communication between counterparties, they have significantly complicated the audit and compliance trail by adding more disparate media to track and log.  Companies spend time and money implementing and maintaining semi-efficient internal processes to complete deals and gather transaction audit logs from phone, email, IM, fax, and mail in an attempt to satisfy regulatory and compliance requirements.

The COMET Market

Our vision is to build a community of energy transactors focused on best practices.  Through COMET, we are creating a central and standard marketplace for these nonstandard transactions.  By leveraging network effects and technology that is not available through phone, fax, e-mail, or IM, COMET provides automated solutions to decrease complexity, increase transparency, and reduce risk.  COMET equips qualified OTC energy participants with electronic tools that support efficient negotiation and execution of highly customized, nonstandard bilateral transactions creating a consistent, repeatable, and easily auditable standard in energy transacting.

COMET provides next generation process efficiency by allowing an originator to quickly and specifically define a transaction profile, control which counterparties to expose the transaction to, carry out discreet one-to-one negotiations, execute the transaction, and generate an automated confirmation.  With industry-leading, robust transaction audit logging and integration with trade-capture, risk management and other systems, COMET easily becomes a productive and efficient solution for front, middle, and back office functions.

Like many businesses, the energy sector faces increasing pressure to demonstrate internal checks and balances, especially in the area of risk management.  With more regulation looming under the Dodd Frank Act, energy companies are being faced with increasing regulation.  Companies that had previously focused more on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”) are giving much more attention to the CFTC.  COMET reduces burdensome, restrictive, and time-consuming transaction processes to better meet both current and contemplated regulatory requirements.