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An Interview with Ken Han, CEO of ENUIT
With the news that Enuit has established a London office to target European CTRM opportunities, ComTech reached out to talk with Enuit CEO, Ken Han to find out more about the company, its products and business strategy.
ComTech Advisory: For those that may be unfamiliar with Enuit can you tell us a bit about the history of the company and products?
Ken Han: Enuit was founded in 2008 with a single goal in mind: To bring to market affordable, functional and fit for purpose trading and risk management software.
Initially, Dave Meyers, Enuit’s President and I created our flagship product ENTRADE® to help companies to track their transactions through the entire deal life cycle: From done deal through sent bill.
Entrade’s interface and flexibility was very well received and as we grew we hired more experts in the ETRM CTRM space to help us develop the solution to become a full front, middle and back office solution covering the full spectrum of commodities from Natural Gas and power, LNG and NGLS, hard and soft commodities to refined products, crude cargos and petrochemicals
ComTech Advisory: I tend to think of Enuit as a US-focused ETRM provider. Apparently, you are now expanding, however. What are your plans in this regard and why now?
Ken Han: Although we are headquartered in Houston we also have a large bulk of our customers in China, Singapore and Japan. We were fortunate enough that Entrade was strong enough to displace some of the larger vendors in APAC and mostly, due to word of mouth, we have grown our customer base very quickly over the last few years in both the United States and Asia.
Our customers are mostly multinational conglomerations and as we have proven our success in the local offices we have entered into agreements to implement Entrade in other global locations.
Because of this, we have now set up permanent offices in China, Singapore and London.
ComTech Advisory: What do you see as the biggest trends in commodity trading and risk management and how will they impact CTRM software?
Ken Han: While we continue to focus on our core strength of our CTRM solution, we also invest in newer technologies as we see values:
Cloud – Efficiently utilize computing power provided by cloud service providers
Assets optimization, advanced analytics and AI
Service API’s
Blockchain
Mobile App
Advanced analytics
ComTech Advisory: In terms of Europe, what does Enuit have to offer that others already in the market cannot?
Ken Han: When we look at Europe there are two parts to it – the first is a mature market with mature software vendors who have legacy systems that they are continually trying to either upgrade or are being acquired and been “made to fit” with other systems that run on completely different coding. The other side is a handful of smaller specialist boutique vendors that were established to fill certain gaps and offer point solutions in their given markets and have now seen an opportunity to grow and are adding plugins and features to their core product to make it work as a fully integrated system.
I have no doubt that some of our competitors in Europe are doing a great job and are providing a good quality product and valuable service to their customers, at the same time I go back to my earlier statement that Entrade was designed to be a fully integrated CTRM solution built to stay current and up to date.
One of our key decisions when building Entrade was to ensure that we do not build custom software patches or product extensions. Instead, we work towards aligning software modifications into our core product. And, we ensure that one version easily migrates to the next version, painlessly. The benefit is that each of our clients gets to share the benefits of enhancements to Entrade without a great deal of upgrade costs.
Our background research has shown us that the European market is missing a strong but elegant and flexible solution that can serve companies as they diversify and grow without having to have multiple vendor solutions to keep their business’ competitive.
ComTech Advisory: If you had to describe Enuit in just a few words – what would they be?
Ken Han: Entrade really works. It has all the functions you need to run your commodity trading business and has one of the best pricing engines on the market that helps to decompose embedded risks in even the most complicated price formulas imaginable.
Entrade’s out-of-the-box features, flexibility and robustness make implementation time quick and helps our customers to get up and running with a full front to back office solution in no time.