CTRM and ETRM software development and integration, around the package your desk already runs.
We build the trade capture, position, risk, settlement and reporting software a commodity or energy desk actually needs, and we wire it into the CTRM or ETRM package, the ERP and the market data feeds you already pay for.
Build from nothing, extend a package, or modernize the system you have. We will say which one fits on the first call, including when the answer is that the package already does it and you should keep it.
- 120+Projects delivered across 12 countries since 2012
- 100+Senior in-house engineers, six countries
- 2 to 4 weeksTypical time from signature to start
- ISTQBCertified QA inside every sprint
- ISO 27001Certified security practice, audited by Quay Audit UK
01Overview
What CTRM and ETRM software actually has to do
CTRM and ETRM software development is the building, integration and modernization of the systems a commodity or energy trading desk runs on: trade capture, position keeping and mark-to-market, confirmations, scheduling, invoicing and settlement, and the regulatory and audit reporting over the top. Our published work here is a private B2B trading platform for a commodity trader, with the client's verified Clutch review behind it; the utility-operator side sits on our energy and utilities page. Four layers below; almost no desk needs all four.
- Capture and confirmGetting the deal into the system in the shape it was actually agreed, and agreeing it with the other side.
- Deal and trade capture
- Bespoke contract structures
- Confirmations
- Position and riskWhat the book is worth right now, and how far it can move before somebody has to be told.
- Position keeping
- Mark-to-market and P&L
- Exposure and limits
- Move and settleThe unglamorous half: physical delivery, invoices, cash, and the systems that hold the money.
- Scheduling and logistics
- Invoicing and settlement
- ERP and bank integration
- Report and proveThe part you are judged on later, by a regulator, an auditor, or a counterparty who disagrees.
- Regulatory reporting
- Audit trail
- Desk and board reporting
02Compare
Build, buy, or build around the package you already have
The question is almost never build or buy in the abstract, because almost every desk already runs something. It is narrower: which part of your desk will the package never model, and is that part worth building around. Five answers we hear, and the route that fits each. The first ends in advice not to build anything.
| What the package will not model | What it costs you | The route that fits |
|---|---|---|
| “Nothing. It models our trade types end to end.” | Nothing, and a rebuild would | Keep it. Put the budget into the data feeds and the one report your middle office rebuilds by hand every month.Get a second opinion firstOr book a meeting |
| “A contract structure it has no field for.” | Deals booked in spreadsheets, outside the book | Build the contract model beside the package and push the positions back into it, so there is still one book.How we build custom systemsOr book a meeting |
| “A settlement rule our counterparties insist on.” | Manual invoicing, disputes, late cash | A confirmation and settlement layer wired to the package, the ERP and the bank, with breaks raised as work.Platform development and integrationOr book a meeting |
| “A risk view the vendor refreshes monthly.” | Pricing and limit calls on a stale position | A reporting layer over one operational store, on a schedule the desk sets rather than the vendor’s release train.Data and reporting engineeringOr book a meeting |
| “It is in-house, a decade old, and nobody will touch it.” | Every change quoted in quarters | Modernize module by module against the live book: APIs and a test harness first, then the modules, desk trading throughout.Legacy software modernizationOr book a meeting |
03Solutions
The six pieces desks ask us to build
Six kinds of work, drawn from what desks ask for once a package is in. Each names the situation it is right for, because most are wrong for most desks.
A capture surface for the trade types the package has no shape for: bespoke contract structures, embedded optionality, physical legs on your counterparties' terms. Positions push back into the book.
- Right when
- The package has no field for it
Mark-to-market, realised and unrealised P&L, and exposure against limits, from one operational store, on the cadence the desk sets rather than the one a vendor ships.
- Right when
- The vendor refreshes it monthly
Confirmations out, invoices matched to the deal and to what was delivered, cash reconciled against the ledger, and breaks raised as work rather than emailed to whoever noticed.
- Right when
- Settlement runs out of a mailbox
Curves, forwards, FX and reference data from the feeds you already pay for, landed once, versioned, and served to every system that needs them rather than pulled four times.
- Right when
- Four systems, four prices
Extracts a repository or an auditor will accept, built off an append-only record of what each deal looked like at the time rather than reconstructed from today's row.
- Right when
- The trail is the deliverable
APIs and a test harness first, then the modules behind them, so a system quoted in quarters for years can change in weeks without the desk stopping for it.
- Right when
- Change is quoted in quarters
04Obligations
What a trading desk has to satisfy, and what we bring to it
A trading system inherits obligations whether anyone planned for them or not, and they arrive from the regulator, the auditor and the counterparty at once. Three that change the shape of a build, then what we bring to them.
Trade reporting with a deadline
EMIR and REMIT in Europe, Dodd-Frank in the US. A reportable trade has to reach a repository inside a window measured in hours, in that repository's format.
- In a build
- A deadline inside the data model
An audit trail nobody can edit
Somebody will eventually ask what a deal looked like on a given date and who changed it since. A record updated in place cannot answer that.
- In a build
- Append-only, costly to retrofit
Valuations you can reproduce
A mark is only defensible if it can be rebuilt from the same curves under the same rules, which makes versioning market data a design decision, not a storage detail.
- In a build
- Curves versioned, not overwritten
ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015
Information security and quality management, renewed through a multi-stage audit with Quay Audit UK. Usually what a counterparty's questionnaire is reaching for.
- What it gives you
- A document trail that already exists
ISTQB-certified QA inside the sprint
Certified QA engineers work inside the sprint rather than after it, which matters most where a defect writes a wrong position or invoice.
- What it gives you
- Defects caught before a booking
Least-privilege access, agreed first
Contracts and NDAs before anyone starts, access agreed with your technical contact, read-only wherever the work allows, your environment where compliance requires it.
- What it gives you
- No production write during discovery
Which regimes bite is a question about your desk, not about us
What you trade, where, and with whom decides which apply, so we scope them at discovery. Where your compliance team already holds a position, we build to it.
Nobody should build a CTRM from nothing if a package already covers their trade types. The real question is narrower than build or buy: which parts of your desk will the package never model. A bespoke contract structure, a settlement rule your counterparties insist on, a risk view you need daily. Those are worth building around. Rewriting trade capture because the vendor's screen is dated is not.
Oleksandr TrofimovCTO & Co-Founder, unicrew05Delivery
How a CTRM or ETRM engagement runs
Four stages, and the first decides the budget. On a desk already running a package, the expensive mistake is agreeing scope before anyone has written down where that package stops. Most engagements start within two to four weeks of signature.
- Draw the boundaryWe sit with the desk, the middle office and whoever owns the package, and write down what it models, what it half-models, and what is happening in a spreadsheet beside it. Worth paying for even when the answer is change nothing.You getWhat stays in the package, and what does not, in writing
- Prove the interface before the featureNothing is built against a package until data has moved both ways in your own environment: a position out, a trade back, and whatever the package then does with it. Integration surprises move dates, so we buy them early.You getA working two-way link, on your data, before scope is fixed
- Ship one workflow against a live bookThe workflow carrying the most manual work goes first, built on real trades and put in front of the people who book them. Nothing replaces the package until it has run beside it and reconciled.You getOne workflow in front of the desk, reconciled
- Reconcile, then hand overParallel running until positions, P&L and settlement match the existing book, then documentation and handover to whoever maintains it. Where you want us to stay, that continues as team extension.You getA parallel-run reconciliation, and a system your team can run
06Proof
What we have actually shipped in trading and finance
One published commodity-trading platform and two adjacent financial builds, each with a verified client review behind it. Both figures are the clients' own, in their own words.
- A commodity-trading platform, built from a PRDA Milan commodity trader arrived with a written PRD and no internal IT team. We built an internal CRM, then a B2B marketplace signing contracts as smart contracts on Ethereum. The co-founder and CEO writes: "Artelogic's development team was composed of 14 people, including backend and frontend software developers and QA specialists". Clutch publishes it anonymously; the work ran under our former Artelogic brand.14people on the team, in the client's own count
- Someone else's financial system, picked up mid-buildA London financial-advisory firm had a part-built bookkeeping platform in ASP.NET MVC, C# and MySQL, and a partner they had stopped working with. We took it over and extended it, encryption and account security included. Their head of product writes: "I was grateful to find a team that not only picked up an unfinished piece of software but also turned it around and improved it."2017the year we took over an unfinished build
- No product to sell youunicrew does not licence a CTRM or ETRM platform, so nothing in our recommendation depends on you replacing yours. The packaged market is mature: ION's Allegro, RightAngle and Openlink, Molecule, Enuit, AEGIS. If one of them models your trade types end to end, keep it and spend on data and reporting instead, and that is the advice you will get.
07Client voices
What trading and finance clients say
I was very satisfied with Artelogic’s project management. They were very good at organizing all the different parts of the project, and our communication was easy; they were always available and proactive. Towards the end of the project, they went the extra mile and worked longer than expected without charging for the extra time, showing a lot of commitment.
Even though Artelogic didn’t have a background in this area, they learned quickly and repurposed technologies they’d used before in order to solve the business problem. I was very impressed with this ability, as most of the people we contacted before implied that they’d need to spend a lot of time of trying to understand our business logic.
08Case studies
Three builds, and the route each one took
One is a commodity-trading platform. The other two are the extend and the modernize routes in neighbouring sectors, because that is where our published work on those routes is.
See all case studies
TradingSoftware for trading with Smart contractsOur client, an experienced commodities trader, came to unicrew with a detailed PRD (Product Requirements Document) to develop the trading platform.
FintechAccounting Software Integration & Automation for a Financial Advisory CompanyBookkeeping reconciliation automated on a build unicrew took over, with no issues reported as transaction sizes grew in testing.- ModernizationRewriting and migrating a legacy platform onto .NET Core (Global On Media)unicrew rewrote Global On Media's legacy code and migrated its servers onto .NET Core, React, and Stencil.js in one engagement.
09Questions
CTRM and ETRM software: frequently asked questions
CTRM (Commodity Trading and Risk Management) covers commodities broadly: metals, agriculture and softs, physical and financial. ETRM (Energy Trading and Risk Management) is the energy subset, power, gas, oil and emissions, and adds what a general CTRM often lacks: scheduling and dispatch against physical delivery, and market-specific regulatory reporting. They overlap heavily. In a build, the difference that matters is the scheduling layer and the reporting deadlines, not the trade capture.
Buy, unless you can name the specific thing the package will not do. The case for building starts when a contract structure has no field in the product, when a counterparty insists on a settlement rule the vendor will not add, or when the risk view you need daily is one the vendor refreshes monthly. Most of our work here is neither: building the missing part beside the package, and keeping one book.
Yes, and it is most of this work. We treat the package as the system of record: positions, trades and static data out, bookings back, reconciled so there is only ever one book. We prove that interface in your own environment before building any feature on it, because integration surprises move dates. Where the platform exposes no usable API, that layer is the first thing we build, as it is for your ERP, bank and market-data feeds.
Three engagement models: time and materials billed hourly and quoted per project, fixed price quoted per project against an agreed outcome, and team extension billed monthly per team member. Which one fits depends on how firm the scope is; we recommend one at the end of discovery. There is no recruitment or placement fee on team extension, and fixed-scope work carries a post-launch warranty whose length is agreed in the contract. We publish no price band, because the range is too wide to be useful.
Most engagements start within two to four weeks of signature. Duration depends on scope, so here is a published figure rather than an average: on the trading platform we built for a Milan commodity trader, the client writes in his Clutch review that the internal CRM stage "took them 3–4 months to complete" and that the marketplace stage "was more complicated and took them around nine months to complete". The first workflow runs against real trades long before either date.
Contracts and NDAs before anyone starts. Least-privilege access agreed with your technical contact, read-only where the work allows, no production write access during discovery. Delivery runs with ISTQB-certified QA engineers inside the sprint, and unicrew holds ISO 27001:2022 and ISO 9001:2015, audited by Quay Audit UK. We do not hold SOC 2, and we tell you rather than let you assume it. Trade reporting under EMIR, REMIT or Dodd-Frank stays yours; we build the audit trail and extracts it needs.
One published trading build, and a lot of adjacent financial work. The trading build is a private B2B commodity platform: a marketplace signing contracts as smart contracts on Ethereum, an integrated CRM and a microservices architecture in Node.js, with the client's verified Clutch review attached. Around it sits financial-systems work of the same shape without the trading label, including a bookkeeping platform we took over and extended for a London financial-advisory firm.
Tell us which part of your desk the package will not model
A call with a senior engineer who has shipped trading and financial systems, not a sales qualifier. You leave with an opinion on build, extend or leave alone.
What happens after you contact us
- We reply within one business dayA senior engineer reads your message, not a bot.
- A call about the deskWhat you trade, what you run, and where the package stops.
- Route and engagement model, in writingBuild, extend or leave alone, priced as time and materials, fixed price, or team extension.
- NDA, then discoveryMost engagements start within two to four weeks of signature.