Platts Unveils Trade Vision API for Natural Gas Price Submitters

S&P Global Platts, the S&P Global-owned price reporting agency, has launched its newest API, Trade Vision, as part of its broader effort to bring commodities markets into the digital age. The Trade Vision API aims to make the price reporting process of US natural gas more efficient for price submitters, though the company also plans to extend it to other commodities and countries.

Price reporting is historically voluntary and highly manual—two things that don’t mix well. This reported data serves as the basis for S&P’s US natural gas indices, of which there are more than 100, says Mark Callahan, Americas director of power and generating-fuels pricing. And more than 80% of natural gas traded in the US annually is traded at the index level. 

“The indices that we publish are a volume-weighted average of trades that are voluntarily reported to us by market participants. So when you think of it that way, the indices are only as good as the number of trades that we have,” says Callahan.

Due to confidentiality agreements, Platts is unable to give the identities of the companies that submit prices, or an exact number, but the company takes in about 5,000 daily trades. Of that figure, about half come directly from market participants, and half are derived from exchanges with which Platts has commercial relationships permitting the company’s use of exchange trades for its indices.

Before live production of the API began at the end of last week, it had been in an exclusive beta environment with one unnamed price submitter for the last few months. Beginning this week, and over the next several months, Platts will onboard other submitters interested in the API.

The Trade Vision API is part of a multi-phase launch that builds off its earlier release under the same “Trade Vision” moniker. In November 2019, the company introduced an online platform that North American price submitters could use, however, the technology underpinning it is the quantum-ledger database and does not utilize any APIs.

In the two decades prior to the release of Trade Vision, Platts’ price submitters would have to generate an Excel file of all their transactions at the end of each day and then email it to the agency. The online submission portal cut out the emailing requirement and offered a much more secure and auditable mode of delivering the data, but submitters still had to manually upload their Excel files into the platform after logging into it.

This newest API, however, is a “game-changer,” Callahan says.

This time, Trade Vision cuts out the Excel portion and the email portion, while keeping the security and audibility that came with phase one. Submitters can opt to report their transactions in bulk once per day, or multiple times per day, but in either case, the reporting is automated.

“What we’re getting at is really to make the process more efficient and easier for the price submitter,” Callahan says. “The more companies we have that decide to submit, the better we are and the more market-reflective the indices are.”

While the structure of natural gas price reporting is unique—S&P produces indices at more than 100 different pipeline locations in the US—the tool has been built with other commodities and locations in mind, says Platts’ Simon Thorne, global director of power and generating-fuels pricing.

“Aside from the structures that make gas in the States unique, the problems—the sort of baseline problems of delivering enormous data in an efficient way that’s fully secure [and] fully auditable—those problems exist in many, many places.”