Freepoint Europe – Doing More with Less Through ClearDox Solutions

Leaders in every industry face pressure to do more with less. A popular target? Functions that don’t produce revenue … like the back office.

Freepoint CommoditiesThis was the case for Freepoint Commodities. The physical commodity merchant specializes in natural gas, oil, and power, boasting a team of over 500 employees in over a dozen locations around the world.

But their Europe/APAC commodities back-office team is small. They already covered a broad range of products. How could the team find the capacity to expand their skills and increase their analytic and business development functions — including adding new products to their duties?

Below, we’ll explore how ClearDox’s Trade Confirmation Intelligent Application saved them time and allowed their back-office team to focus on these higher-level tasks.

ClearDox Helped Freepoint’s
Small Team Do More

  • Reduce daily reconciliation time from ~3 hours to just 30 minutes per employee.
  • Save the team over 15 man-hours per day — more than 75 hours per week.
  • Automate the reconciliation of thousands of transactions, identifying the small number needing extra attention.
  • Standardize and speed up processes, minimizing manual errors.
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THE CHALLENGE:

Inefficient Manual Processes and Inconsistent Data

In an industry where efficiency is everything, Freepoint struggled to efficiently reconcile trades for cleared contracts.

Manually processing and checking thousands of transactions took each employee two to three hours per day. Not only was this manual process prone to errors, but it also kept the team from conducting in-depth risk assessments, employee development activities, and analytics tasks that might uncover issues or errors more quickly.

The data itself was also a problem.

Incoming trade confirmations came in many forms: Excel, PDF, CSV, FTP and faxes. And consistency was an issue; brokers were prone to change formats, column headings, or terms used, making it difficult to consistently gather all needed information.

All this manual processing and inconsistent data left the team with little time to grow their skills or expand their duties.

Something had to change, and quickly.

Manual data reconciliation

THE SOLUTION:

Automation With ClearDox Trade Confirmation Solution

Automated trade process

Working in close collaboration with the ClearDox team, the Head of European Operations Friederike Brandt and her colleagues deployed the Trade Confirmation solution that automated processes in ways that specifically suited their needs.

Incoming trade confirmations came in many forms: Excel, PDF, CSV, FTP and even faxes. The ClearDox team worked collaboratively with Freepoint and their partners to make sure digitized data was clean and consistent. As part of the digitization, ClearDox developed and deployed a combination of optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning models to extract information. In each case, the choice of models was maximized by selecting the best possible technology for the task at hand.

ClearDox also took full advantage of their deep commodities markets experience to shorten the development cycle and offer suggestions to improve Freepoint’s existing practices and processes, further improving the team’s efficiency.

THE RESULTS:

Significant Time Savings and Enhanced Productivity

Working with the commodities experts at ClearDox, Brandt and her team were able to standardize and speed up their processes.

Instead of manually checking thousands of cleared trades, the team can now rely on ClearDox to automate reconciliation, flagging the small number (typically 10-20) of transactions that need human attention. As a result, daily reconciliation times have dropped from as high as three hours to only 30 minutes per employee, saving the team over 15 man-hours per day, or more than 75 hours per week.

Taking hours of tedious work off their to-do list has transformed the Freepoint team. Not only are they happier, but they now have time to focus on expanding their skills and functions … including adding new products. One of Brandt’s overall goals for her team was to create a roster of “all-rounders” who could handle many tasks and— in the process—develop a greater understanding of the needs, requirements, and objectives of the company. Now, that dream is closer to reality.

time-management-productivity

And as it turned out, it wasn’t only the back-office that got more efficient thanks to ClearDox: The solution decreased the time traders had to spend on reconciliation tasks, allowing them to focus on generating ideas and revenue for the firm.

“I am continually impressed by the versatility and flexibility of ClearDox’ intelligent application solutions. The level of experience and insight generated by the ClearDox team has us looking for more ways to expand our activities into monthly reconciliations and documentary LCs.”

– Friederike Brandt, Head of European Operations, Freepoint Commodities

ClearDox reconciliation automation

ClearDox® allows commodity-intensive businesses to reduce decision risk with better information by digitizing and automating critical data-intensive processes. We are unique in the space, by offering turnkey SaaS solutions embedded with operational AI-models specific to your commodity trade lifecycle gaps and challenges.

Want to see how ClearDox can transform your reconciliation?