COMMODITY TRADING BUSINESS & TECHNOLOGY
We help close the gap between business and technology in commodity trading.
Our consultants bring senior leadership experience from trading desks, technology, and management consulting, so you’ll be working with people who’ve sat in your seat.
Enabling your organization to win
In successful commodity trading companies, business and IT are as inseparable as the driver, engine, and support team in a winning F1 team.
To win the race, all three need to work in perfect harmony: skilled traders behind the wheel, a high-performance system landscape under the hood, and a strong IT and support crew in the pit.
Bridging business, operations, and technology is therefore at the very heart of what we do.
2011
CF was founded
+25
core consultants
+€100m
program management
+100
consultants
Our services
We deliver commodity consulting and commodity trading solutions across the full trading value chain.
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We help you define, review, and assess your strategy and technology landscape independently. Whether you're evaluating a market expansion, a new ETRM platform, or a broader operating model change, our advisory work gives you a clear, realistic view of the options before you commit resources.
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We manage commodities trading transformation programs end-to-end, turning strategy into an operational reality without disrupting live trading. Our consultants have run large-scale transformations from the inside, so we sequence delivery around your desk's realities rather than a generic project template.
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We define, manage, and deliver commodity trading and technology projects on time and on budget, taking accountability for outcomes rather than just process. You get a delivery team that understands both the commercial pressure of a trading business and the technical complexity of the systems supporting it.
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We assess your situation and can support you with selection, implementation, and upgrade of different trading related platforms like ETRMs, EDMs etc.. From system selection through go-live and beyond, we make sure the platform fits how your business trades, not just how it's configured out of the box.
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We design and build custom integrations and application development to connect your trading, risk, and operational systems into a single, reliable landscape. This is often where transformation programs succeed or fail, so we treat integration as a strategic workstream rather than an afterthought.
CommodityFirst was founded and is managed by people with senior management experience from the commodity, technology, and management consulting industries.
We have sat in our clients’ seats, which means we bring concrete answers from day one.
Together, the team covers and possesses in-depth knowledge of the entire value chain of commodity trading and the technology required to support and address the most critical challenges our clients face in the world of:
Utilities
IPPs
Trading houses
Investment banks
Energy majors
Commodity-intensive industrials
Commodity trading & technology expertise matters
“Turnaround and quality of the work was excellent.”
“I am very satisfied with the cooperation with the team and the results. It is a good foundation for our future work.”
“Excellent expertise on trading related processes.”
Frequently asked questions
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Our engagements span the full trading value chain: from strategy reviews and target operating model design, through capability assessments and risk framework development, to ETRM selection and implementation and real-time toolkit deployment. We scope each assignment around the specific gap you’re trying to close, rather than applying a fixed methodology.
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We start with an independent assessment of your current business and technology setup against where your trading strategy is heading: expansion into new commodities, markets, or renewables exposure often outpaces what the existing landscape can support. We’ll give you a clear view of whether the gap is strategic, operational, or purely technical before recommending a path.
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Yes, this is one of our core specialties. We manage transformation and system changes in parallel with live trading operations, sequencing delivery so the desk keeps running while the underlying landscape changes underneath it.
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We work alongside your team as an extension of it, not a replacement. Depending on what you need, we can provide a few subject matter experts, a complete project team, or anything in between. The decision is yours.
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Our senior consultants deliver immediate impact and you can count on the same seniors throughout the whole assignment, never substitutes. When your subject-matter experts are stretched, we proxy them, so your projects keep the momentum and never stall. We leave your teams stronger, with lasting capabilities rather than a dependency on us.
Almost all of our consultants have direct commodity trading backgrounds, as former C-level managers, trading desk heads, originators, risk managers, solutions and data Architects, technology leads, or IT strategists, rather than coming purely from a technology or generalist consulting background. That means less time spent explaining your business to us. You can expect value delivered from day 1.
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Timelines depend on scope, but we always start by building a realistic implementation roadmap tied to a solid business case, so you know the investment, the sequencing, and the expected outcome before committing to a full program.
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Yes, we scale from individual subject matter experts to full project teams, so you can bring in exactly the level of support the situation calls for.
Industry Insights
