At Equias our mission is to enable more people to trade more, thus making the European energy market fit for the future. We’ve been committed to this task for more than 20 years – and remain as passionate as ever.

One of the greatest barriers to a more democratised bilateral energy market trading environment is the sheer volume of non-standard relationships. At Equias we have worked with the industry since 2003 to successfully replace non-standard with standardised relationships – enabling industry-wide automation of essential processes.

For example, attempting to exchange and agree daily margining positions with counterparties currently requires highly valuable senior staff to operate manually-intensive procedures – limiting both the number of counterparties and how frequently they can be margined. This, despite the fact that credit and cash liquidity were at the very heart of the recent European energy market crisis – and will continue to be an ever-present danger until the market has the tools to manage the credit/cash balance through those bilateral relationships more effectively.

Introducing electronic Bilateral Margining

This is why the very latest addition to our portfolio has been designed to help you trade even more confidently. Scheduled for commercial release in 2024, our electronic Bilateral Margining (eBM) service will fully automate this process, thus enabling more traders to bilaterally margin each other more frequently.

  • No more agreeing daily margining positions manually via email and spreadsheets.
  • No more inefficiency and uncertainty.
  • No more limits on how many counterparty margining relationships you can cope with.

Through standardising the bilateral margining process with eBM, our goal is to provide the bilateral European energy market with the tools to better manage the credit/cash balance – thus placing it on a par with exchange trading from a risk perspective; all whilst retaining your own discretion in managing counterparty credit and gaining the potential cash benefits of doing so in comparison to the cleared market.

  • View our eBM white paper
  • A working group of users is now consulting with us to explore the details of how we can best deliver this service. Would you like to participate? Let’s talk

Preparing for the day-after-tomorrow: with multilateral netting

Where, ultimately, will the trading lifecycle standardisation and automation take us?

We envision a European energy landscape where daily margining and settlement is the norm for the entire market; increasing its integrity and resilience to shocks, making it fit for purpose to serve both physically asset backed and financially cash-rich participants.

Watch this space for more information on this topic, including a new Equias white paper scheduled for Q1 2024.

How we build insight with data

Ever heard of the Liquidity Cube? It’s one of several ongoing projects initiated by Equias to gain even greater understanding of the European energy market – and unlock greater value for our users. Read more