Murex In Commodities – an interview with Farah Oubari

Gary Vasey: Please give us a little historical context to Murex in the commodities trading and risk space

Farah Oubari: Commodities are not a recent extension for Murex. They have been part of the platform’s story from very early on, alongside equities and other asset classes, and have shaped the cross-asset DNA that still differentiates MX.3 today. Founded in 1986, Murex remains privately owned by its founders: independent, self-funded, with no private equity backing and no debt. That independence has allowed us to invest in MX.3 with a genuinely long-term view, including over EUR 1 billion in R&D over the past decade. From the outset, our philosophy has been to build one integrated platform covering trading, treasury, risk and post-trade on a single code base, rather than assembling a patchwork of point solutions. This long-term approach is one reason Murex is now recognized as one of the global leaders in energy and commodities technology, not only as a platform provider but as a partner for enterprise-wide trading and risk transformation.

Today, MX.3 for E/CTRM supports a broad range of energy and commodities players—banks, utilities, producers, traders, cooperatives and precious metals players—as part of more than 300 MX.3 clients across 65 countries. This market footprint is reinforced by Murex’s leadership in industry benchmarks: in the Energy Risk Software Rankings, Murex led more categories than any other company, with 19 first-place positions, alongside a global risk franchise serving more than 250 clients. For clients, the value lies in the breadth of coverage and consistency across the business chain. The same trade can drive position, P&L, enterprise risk management, accounting and post-trade processes, helping clients price complex structures, manage exposure and risk, reduce reconciliation and operate from one consistent model.

What do you see driving interest in CTRM and risk management in energy and commodities these days?

Three forces are driving interest.

First, sustained volatility is increasing trading and hedging activity, making timely visibility on exposures, P&L and risk even more important.

Second, many firms are reaching the limits of legacy platforms and fragmented architectures, driving demand for more resilient and less siloed operating models.

Third, the energy transition is reshaping the product landscape. Power and gas are setting a higher benchmark for risk management. Electrification, AI infrastructure and transition investment are increasing demand for metals, PPAs and environmental products. Clients need systems that can manage physical optionality and financial hedging as part of the same portfolio.

A structural shift is also underway on the financial institution side. Renewed profit pools, inflation-hedging demand and energy transition exposure are prompting a wave of banks to reopen or expand commodities desks. They are reactivating power desks, re-entering base metals and building out precious metals and structured product capabilities. This is not a niche trend. It spans global, regional and emerging-market banks. It is increasing demand for platforms that can support cross-asset trading, enterprise risk and scalable operations quickly.

This has become a Murex executive committee topic because commodity volatility now affects earnings, liquidity, capital allocation, supply resilience and growth strategy. Risk management is no longer a control function sitting behind the business; it shapes where firms trade, how much risk they carry and how quickly they can respond when markets move. The winners will be firms that can understand, control and act on exposures faster while remaining resilient under stress.

What do you see as your competitive differentiators in energy and commodities, and how do they cross-reference the business drivers above?

Analytics is a key differentiator for MX.3. The platform combines advanced analytics, broad product coverage, enterprise-scale risk management and genuine front-to-back integration. It offers a rich library of analytics for curves, volatility surfaces and complex payoffs, while remaining open for clients to integrate proprietary quantitative models and plug in their own libraries. This enables firms to preserve their intellectual property and leverage MX.3 across pricing, risk, P&L, reporting and operations. 
1. Advanced analytics: out-of-the-box analytics for curves, volatility surfaces and complex payoffs, combined with an open framework for proprietary pricing and risk libraries. 
2. Real-time risk: VaR, credit and limits managed in real time, matching the need for speed and resilience. 
3. Enterprise risk depth: market risk, credit risk, XVA, stress testing and analytics handled through one cross-asset engine. 
4. Open architecture: REST APIs and standard market interfaces, so MX.3 fits into existing ecosystems without forcing a full rip-and-replace. 
5. Energy transition ready: support for renewable power, PPAs and environmental certificates as clients move into new markets.

Integration alone is no longer enough in this market. The differentiator is what integration enables. Murex brings commodity trading, treasury, market risk, credit risk, collateral, liquidity and finance onto a single platform, helping firms manage commodity exposure as an enterprise-wide business issue rather than a trading silo. This is where MX.3 stands out: market, credit and liquidity risk and XVA are managed across the whole organization; VaR and stress tests can be run pre-trade; pre-deal exposure and PFE checks support faster decisions; and a transparent calculation chain remains auditable from global figures down to trade-level contributions. In energy, risk is no longer siloed. It sits at the heart of trading decisions, capital usage and operational resilience, backed by sustained Murex investment in risk and analytics.

For clients, the value is practical: they can deploy capital more efficiently, react faster to opportunities, strengthen governance and stay in control under stress. MX.3’s differentiator is its “one number” architecture: the same trade record drives pricing, position, P&L, market and credit risk, PFE, XVA, collateral and finance, reducing the reconciliation breaks that fragment competing stacks. This strength is independently validated by top positions in 19 Energy Risk categories, based on client votes. MX.3 covers power, gas, oil, base and precious metals, environmental products and agriculture across more than 2,400 instruments, with continuous investment to keep pace with fast-moving markets.

What is your current focus in terms of enhancements to your offering for energy and commodities?

Our enhancement roadmap continues to focus on the areas where clients face the greatest complexity: physical asset modeling, energy transition products, precious metals innovation and enterprise risk management.

Our enhancement focus follows what clients are asking for in the most demanding markets: standardized modeling of physical assets—batteries, hydro plants, thermal plants and gas storage—as first-class instruments, with the ability to plug in clients’ own optimization libraries for portfolio analytics. This capability is already live in production. Alongside this, MX.3 now supports tokenized gold through its digital assets module, extending coverage to a broad set of digital asset use cases that clients are looking to scale. MX.3 treats tokenized bullion within the same operating model as physical gold, derivatives, collateral and risk, helping clients avoid a separate digital-asset silo. This matters because precious metals players and banks do not want innovation to create a parallel control environment; they want new products to inherit the same valuation, lifecycle, risk and operational discipline as the rest of the book.

MX.3 for Power and Gas is purpose-built for the 15-minute European market, with 60-, 30- and 15-minute curve construction, hourly VaR and cash-flow-at-risk, and clients running the full lifecycle. Electricity curve calibration has been enhanced to support hourly, semi-hourly and quarter-hourly curves, and clients can inject their own models and calculations. Commodity-linked financing and repos cover fixed/fixed and fixed/floating structures across metals and carbon, with full lifecycle support. Carbon coverage is expanding to China ETS, ACCU, NZU compliance and voluntary markets, while precious metals capabilities include a native local stochastic volatility model capturing the FX-COM duality. The common thread across these enhancements is helping clients manage the next generation of commodity risk, which is more volatile, more data-driven and more closely linked to capital and liquidity decisions, without fragmenting their operating model.

Integration is one of the biggest challenges with CTRM and related solutions these days – how does Murex approach this issue?

For MX.3, integration is less of a pain point than in fragmented architectures. This is by design. Because trading, risk, operations and finance share the same trade, data and analytics, much of the reconciliation that would otherwise sit between systems is handled within the platform, reducing gaps between valuation, risk and finance.

MX.3 also remains open to the wider ecosystem through REST APIs and standard market interfaces. This is independently recognized: Murex ranked first in this year’s Energy Risk Software Rankings for Ease of Integrating, Trade Capture & Processing, STP and Scalability. The platform provides standard connectivity to ICE, CME, EEX, LME, Trayport, SGX, ERPs, scheduling, clearing and data lakes.

Beyond the platform, delivery capacity is a key part of the Murex value proposition. Murex combines 1,600 delivery consultants with a partner ecosystem of over 4,500 system-integrator specialists and has delivered more than 500 projects worldwide over the past five years. That scale matters for energy and commodities programs, where successful delivery depends on product expertise, local proximity, upgrade capability and continuity from implementation to support.

Where do you see AI playing a role at Murex in energy and commodities now and into the future?

Over the next five years, we expect energy and commodities markets to become even more real-time, data-intensive and interconnected. Firms will need to assess the impact of weather events, supply disruptions, geopolitical developments and changing market conditions across increasingly complex portfolios. AI can help them make sense of these signals, explore forward-looking scenarios and respond faster as risks and opportunities emerge.

At Murex, we see AI as a great opportunity to improve decision-making, operational efficiency and the user experience. In the near term, that means applying it to areas such as pricing and risk analysis, post-trade operations, exception management and user support. The goal is to help teams find the right information faster, reduce manual investigation and focus their expertise on the decisions that matter most.

Over time, the opportunity goes further. AI could help firms move from understanding what has already happened to assessing what could happen next. For example, it could generate plausible scenarios grounded in real-world developments and translate them into potential impacts on P&L, liquidity, collateral or funding. This is particularly relevant in energy and commodities, where physical events can quickly translate into market, credit and operational risks.

Murex’s role is to make these capabilities useful and dependable in a real business environment. AI delivers the greatest value when it is connected to trusted data, robust analytics and the controls governing each workflow. MX.3 already brings together positions, valuations, risk calculations and front-to-back processes. Our approach is to build AI on this strong foundation, embedding it directly into the workflows, interfaces and data that users already work with, rather than introducing another disconnected tool.

We established Murex AI Research to explore precisely these questions: how AI will reshape capital markets and how it can help our clients work more effectively, identify new opportunities and respond to new risks. It connects frontier research with the evolution of MX.3, helping us turn AI’s potential into practical, governed capabilities while keeping clients firmly in control as their markets become faster and more complex.