We often hear of new E/CTRM initiatives at ComTech and so when Marc Zabal emailed us regarding his new project, we were interested to find out more. Marc, of course, has extensive experience with firms like InstaNext and TriplePoint in the past, but he felt as if CTRM was ‘stuck.’ To that end, he developed and launched OpenCTRM as a product-led SaaS CTRM platform with credit card signup and 30-day free trials to try to shake up the market. OpenCTRM focuses on basic functionality—trade capture, mark-to-market, and market data warehousing, he told us. It also features completely open APIs for third-party extensions. For now, it targets primarily financial trading and hedging use cases rather than full physical commodity management. “The system also captures products, physical purchases/sales, forecasts, and inventory levels so that it can produce an accurate financial outlook. We just don’t manage the actual movement and storage of physicals,” he told me. Its first customers are a metals CTA and a restaurant chain using it for tracking product input costs. “OpenCTRM targets companies that never seem to buy traditional CTRM systems due to their large price tags and implementation fees,” he said. “The system also captures products, physical purchases/sales,… continue reading