ComFin Software proudly sponsored the Oil Trading Risks 2014 (OTR 2014) summiton 22-23 October, 2014 that took place in Geneva, Switzerland. This event provided a platform for oil trading professionals and CTRM vendors eager to learn more about how to mitigate risk in the current market.

This event provided a senior-level platform which thoroughly covered the downstream challenges and risks faced by oil trading companies. In line with ComFin’s approach, from the beginning on it was perfectly established that with oil being such a volatile, political and essential commodity, managing the risks related to its trading has become a very important part of the oil trading companies’ strategy to maintain their profits. Whether they arise from changing regulatory frameworks, political instability and unrest in producing countries, financial operations or supply chain disruptions; risks need to be managed in a very efficient way to avoid losses, reputational damage and insecure supply chains. ComFin’s delegates at the event were pleased to see that more and more oil trading companies are now trying to instill the importance of efficient risk management into their employees and hence there is now a very strong interest in CTRM systems to help them with this. In short, it became evident that a healthy “risk culture” in organizations is now becoming increasingly critical – something that ComFin Software has been working on for quite some time with the creation of its fully functional risk modules.

The summit covered critical risk management areas such as:

  • Market risk
  • Credit risk
  • Regulatory risk
  • Political risk
  • Financial risk

Needless to say, emphasis was also put on the importance of having effective E/CTRM systems in place so as to best manage all these risk-related challenges, including presentations on how to best optimize CTRM systems and the challenges behind a successful implementation of CTRM systems. ComFin was happy to share experiences with new prospects and also had the chance to catch up with a few familiar faces from both current and old clients.

The summit featured an expert line-up, including credit risk managers, market risk specialists and compliance professionals from key oil trading companies who shared their experience with the rest of attendees. In the end it was a very successful event with an excellent networking atmosphere that shed a lot of light on the current risk management challenges, how to best face them and how to procure a CTRM system with all due diligence in order to efficiently mitigate risk.