Platts Advances API, Data Delivery Strategy for Digitizing Commodities Markets

As part of its ongoing effort to move the commodities market into the digital age, S&P Global Platts is rolling out a string of new APIs aimed at helping commodities traders see and dissect the underlying factors that drive prices of physical assets.

As technology and electronic trading has taken hold in global markets, its rate of adoption in equities trading has far outpaced other asset classes, especially commodities—a finding that struck Silvina Aldeco-Martinez, when she took up her role as chief product officer for S&P Global Platts nearly two years ago, after 16 years working for other divisions of the data giant.

The first of the APIs will center on oil markets with two releases: the Platts World Refinery API and the Platts Oil Inventory API.

Based on the Platts World Refinery Database, the Refinery API can be integrated with firms’ proprietary models, and provides a view of the downstream value chain, from crude inputs to product outputs, as well as access to datasets covering outages, capacity, runs, and yields for crude and refined products. The Oil Inventory API is based on Platts’ similar database for global oil inventories, providing current and historical data covering crude oil and refined petroleum products inventories and tank capacities, but with a specialized focus on the US and China.

Users can access the APIs either through the Platts Developer Portal or the S&P Global Marketplace, a “storefront” of datasets sourced from all of S&P Global’s business silos and third parties.

Though the machine-to-machine delivery channels, traders are immediately alerted on their desktops to fluctuations in the underlying data or events that may cause fluctuations to occur soon.

Aldeco-Martinez says that delivering data to an application in a manner that allows it to “pop the information into your face as it happens” creates faster decision-making than making data available via an application that requires users to go search for it.  “What we’re trying to do, and what these two APIs are an example of, is feed the information through the main piping,” she says.

These first APIs are partly inspired by oil’s highly-volatile spring, during which prices went negative for the first time in history as countries locked down and shuttered their businesses, halting the usual steady demand for oil, while supply remained high. In turn, storage facilities were near capacity, says Stan Guzik, chief technology and innovation officer at S&P Global Platts. Had the APIs been around at the time, he says traders may have been able to get ahead of the shock that came

“There was really a shortage of where to store it. In our APIs, in our datasets, we track that, so as we deliver from our machines to other machines, whether it was the traders or the customers, they would have had this data applied in their models, which would give them sharp insights in a timely manner,” Guzik says.

As a technical undertaking, building data delivery in a way that ensures customers and traders around the globe receive necessary information quickly is no small feat. Because commodities are physical assets, produced and stored and shipped worldwide, the delivery platform needed to be situated in several regions around the world, very close to the different commodities markets.

Platts also leveraged the cloud to help serve up the data to the traders sitting oceans away, but Guzik says the challenge lies in making sure it’s delivered in milliseconds, even from across the globe.

The vendor is already working on the next sets of APIs, which will likely begin with petrochemicals and North American gas, potentially followed by APIs for freight and shipping data.