VAKT welcomes S&P Global Commodity Insights and Argus Media as new investors
Thursday, June 9, 2022
VAKT Global today announces two new investors: Argus Media Limited and S&P Global Commodity Insights, which includes S&P’s Platts price benchmarks. Both have acquired a minority stake.
As customer adoption of the VAKT APIs continues, we are excited to add two new partners considered essential to the pricing of global crude and refined products. The investments ensure that VAKT customers will in time benefit from the combination of benchmark commodity pricing with blockchain and tokenization technologies.
VAKT CEO, Etienne Amic, commented: “We are delighted to welcome S&P Global Commodity Insights and Argus Media to the capital of VAKT. Transaction and nomination volumes on the VAKT platform have grown substantially over the past year. Our trade recap and confirmation facility for all waterborne oil trades, vSure, is now operational. Our logistics facility, vLogistics, which allows nominations and actuals to be exchanged between traders, terminals and inspectors, has met success and is now poised to expand globally. Argus Media and S&P Global are pillars of the energy trading world, with deep expertise, exhaustive commercial footprints and a range of digital assets serving the industry. We look forward to fruitful collaborations between these ecosystems with a view to fully digitise the execution, confirmation, title transfer and settlement of physical commodity markets.”
Argus Media Chairman and CEO, Adrian Binks, commented: “We are excited to become an investor in VAKT and look forward to working with its management team and with our mutual customers. By interfacing with Argus’ systems and data, VAKT customers will benefit from enhanced information and intelligence flows, which could transform the way energy and commodities markets work.”
S&P Global Commodity Insights Head of Market Reporting and Trading Solutions, Dave Ernsberger, commented: “This investment furthers our collaboration in the areas of our benchmark Platts price assessments and VAKT’s innovative blockchain technology to advance efficiencies and transparency in post-trading workflows. As the commodity market continues to evolve, we see numerous customer benefits in pairing our pricing tools and expertise with VAKT’s innovative technology and solutions.”
About VAKT: VAKT was formed by a group of oil majors, traders, and trade finance providers. Our founders recognised a problem that required action: the physical post trade process was reliant on manual, complex, repetitive and therefore error-prone processes.
VAKT has created a single digital record where all of the details and stages of a trade can be agreed, recorded and seen, securely, by all partners involved in a trade. This means partners can identify opportunities to improve a trade in real time, and our technology ensures the same record is available in whichever systems VAKT users choose it to be, removing the need for double keying and other inefficiencies.
About Argus Media: Argus is an independent media organisation with over 1,200 staff. It is headquartered in London and has 27 offices in the world’s principal commodity trading and production centres. Argus produces price assessments and analysis of international energy and other commodity markets and offers bespoke consulting services and industry-leading conferences.
Companies in 140 countries around the world use Argus data to index physical trade and as benchmarks in financial derivative markets as well as for analysis and planning purposes.
Argus was founded in 1970 and is a privately held UK-registered company. It is owned by employee shareholders, global growth equity firm General Atlantic and Hg, the specialist software and technology services investor.
About S&P Commodity Insights: At S&P Global Commodity Insights, our complete view of global energy and commodities markets enables our customers to make decisions with conviction and create long-term, sustainable value. We’re a trusted connector that brings together thought leaders, market participants, governments, and regulators and we create solutions that lead to progress. Vital to navigating Energy Transition, S&P Global Commodity Insights’ coverage includes oil and gas, power, chemicals, metals, agriculture and shipping, and is home to S&P’s Platts price benchmarks, a respected source of physical price assessments that reflect transactional values for an ever-growing range of markets.
S&P Global Commodity Insights is a division of S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI). S&P Global is the world’s foremost provider of credit ratings, benchmarks, analytics and workflow solutions in the global capital, commodity and automotive markets. With every one of our offerings, we help many of the world’s leading organizations navigate the economic landscape so they can plan for tomorrow, today. For more information visit https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights.
The S&P Global Commodity Insights team was supported in this investment by the S&P Global Ventures team. S&P Global Ventures has invested in over 30 innovative firms active in financial, commodities and other markets. For more information visit https://www.spglobal.com/en/venture/overview.
