CubeLogic Customer Newsletter
Welcome to our 2018 newsletter. 18 months on from the Management Buy-Out in September 2016 CubeLogic has well and truly arrived… This newsletter provides a brief update on what has been happening and a look at what’s in store for the coming months. Some of the highlights include…
Singapore Expansion
Q4 2017 saw a significant milestone for CubeLogic as we opened an office in Singapore to service the needs of our ever-growing customer base in the APAC region. Headed up by Karl Sees we have invested significantly in order to provide a truly global service with offices now in London, Houston, Bangalore and Singapore.
Lee Campbell, CEO, CubeLogic, comments, “Setting foot in Singapore is a logical step in our ambitious business growth plans. Being a major commodity hub and a strategic location, we look forward with much enthusiasm to leveraging the geographical area’s talent pool, infrastructure and favourable economic dynamics.”
Three months on from the office opening, Karl has established the business operation and is now full steam ahead on growing our client base. Karl is a leader in credit, counterparty and market risk management with over 25 years of practitioner experience in the finance and energy sectors. As well as heading up the Singapore business Karl is also responsible for driving the product roadmap and engaging with clients to ensure their needs are prioritised.
Appointments
- Karl Sees – MD, APAC, LinkedIn Link
- Mark Crosno – VP US Sales, LinkedIn Link
- Swati Kaushal – Pre Sales and Account Manager, LinkedIn Link
- Saurabh Basu – PMO Product Roadmap, LinkedIn Link
Cubes in the Cloud launch
Early 2018 saw us launch ‘Cubes in the Cloud’, our state of the art Software-as-a-Service solution for Risk3 which enables users to consolidate, analyse, manage and mitigate their risks in a cloud hosted environment. This latest SaaS offering augments the broad spectrum of risk management solutions which CubeLogic are already providing to some of the world’s leading organizations. ‘Cubes in the Cloud’ was developed as a result of inbound enquiries from existing and potential clients.
CubeLogic are also delighted to announce the signing of their second and third ‘Cubes in the Cloud’ clients after the solution had already been implemented into live production by a global energy utility. This deal consolidated the strategic relationship between the two organizations which was initiated in 2010.
Lee Campbell, CEO commented. “This is an important step forward for CubeLogic and we see SaaS becoming the preferred method of adopting innovative, new technologies. With increased regulation and market volatility, firms need to be agile and use technology which supports their ever-changing business needs. The benefits of deploying software in this way are such that upgrades, and changes can be implemented swiftly, there is far less disruption to business-as-usual and costs are reduced. Our Risk3 solution already has extensive functionality across credit, market, liquidity and regulatory risk management and our roadmap is packed with new features over the coming months as we continue to invest in our solutions. More importantly, we already have our first live client on the ‘Cubes in the Cloud’ platform.”
We showcased ‘Cubes in the Cloud’ at eWorld in Essen in February and the response was extremely positive.
ISO 27001:2013
We followed up our launch of Cubes in the Cloud with process and security improvements and are proud to announce that we have successfully achieved our IS0 20017:2013 certification following an extensive independent audit our of systems and processes.
ISO 27001:2013 is an information security standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the world’s largest developer of voluntary international standards, and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
Lee Campbell, CEO commented, “Integrity, confidentiality and our clients’ information are of the utmost importance when delivering software and services to our blue-chip client base. Compliance is not a ‘nice to have’ but rather an absolute imperative operating in the industries that we do. This certification demonstrates our continued commitment to information security at every level and that our technology has been approved by a recognized body to have the capabilities and processes which are needed to properly control clients’ data.”
The ISO 27001:2013 certification applies across the CubeLogic business solutions.
Significant business development
After signing Koch Industries at the start of 2017, we have really had to focus our efforts on ensuring we were well equipped to deliver against all of our clients’ growing requirements. We have invested significantly in the team and the technology.
We’ve kicked off 2018 with some significant exciting additions to our growing client base. Firstly, we welcome Anglo-American, who will be deploying our Cubes in the Cloud offering for Credit Risk. We have also recently welcomed Greensill Capital to the Cube family, again deploying Cubes in the Cloud for client on-boarding, KYC and Credit Risk management with automation of financials from CapitalIQ and KYC information from D&B.
Introduction of account management function
We are committed to providing excellent customer service. Therefore, to serve our expanding business we have introduced a dedicated Account Management function in EMEA which aims to:
- Deepen strategic partnerships with our clients to establish CubeLogic as a trusted and valued advisor to their businesses.
- Help identify ways to maximise our client’s investments in CubeLogic’s solutions.
- Maintain a close understanding of the client’s business and its evolution and act as the client’s advocate within CubeLogic, helping them deliver on their business needs.
We have recently appointed our first Strategic Account Manager, Swati Kaushal, who is a functional trading and risk management professional with 10 years of international experience working with leading oil and gas majors and global commodity trading firms, Swati will be your contact point in EMEA for commercial needs, roadmap requests, feedback and escalations. We plan to roll out the account management to the US and Singapore operations as the business expands in those regions.
Swati has already met with most of the EMEA customers and will be scheduling regular meetings with all customers to continuously gather feedback and refine joint account plans to better define how CubeLogic can deliver ongoing value to its EMEA clients.
User Group
In 2017 we initiated our European and US advisory boards. This is a vital source of client input into our product roadmap. The first European one was in October and a US event held in November. Looking forward over the next few months, we will hold our next European Advisory Board on 23rd May. At that time, we will present the progress made, the new functionality in our 6.2 release and the updated plan for the rest of the year. A Houston-based event is also in planning for September.
Our User Groups are now well established and the one held in January at Hispania in London was very well attended.
We will be sending further invitations and details in due course.
Product roadmap update
Towards the end of 2017, we initiated changes to Product Management, and in particular our approach to managing our product roadmap. This resulted in holding our first European and US Advisory boards, where we presented our proposed roadmap priorities and engaged in significant debate and feedback. This resulted in the well-received 2018 roadmap plan presented at our January User Conference. We are now full steam ahead for an ambitious set of deliveries throughout 2018 (no pressure!). The functional improvements include but are not limited to:
- Tool for physical tracking and assigning of LCs
- New improved UIs for counterparty, limit and exposure management
- Migration of the portal to HTML5 for cross browser/device access
- Pivot table enhancements
- Financial Accounting Cube
- Generic rules engine
- Enhancements to letters of credit, financial spreading
- Standard interfaces to BvD, S&P Capital IQ and D&B
The quality of customer feedback has been incredible; please keep it up!
The technology innovation also continues with further use of the Microsoft Azure platform, continued use of Power BI, the introduction of WebAPIs and our first Tabular Cubes.
Other organisational changes include the hiring of a Roadmap PMO, Saurabh Basu, who is already having a tremendous impact through the implementation of a more agile approach. Saurabh has also initiated a series of innovations in Quality Assurance that will see us improve the speed and scope of testing.
We hope to receive more enthusiastic input to help guide our development plans.
Product support
CubeLogic has undergone a major review of its support process and taken vital feedback from clients on past experiences. A new Global Support Manager has been appointed to help get a firm grip on the support process as well as review the client communications and open incidents. Since January 2018 monthly client meetings have been established to ensure we are constantly in touch with our user base, a review of the current SLA categories has been completed to ensure incidents can be categorised correctly as well as a complete review of all open tickets.
Open incidents have fallen from 175 in December 2017 to 18 as of the end of March 2018. This has largely been the result of ensuring incidents are properly tracked through their life cycle as well as working closely with clients to resolve pending items. This will allow the CubeLogic support team to provide clear focus and attention where needed in the future.
EnergyRisk Software Rankings 2018
The results from the recent survey from EnergyRisk magazine are just in and we’re proud to announce that CubeLogic has been ranked number one for the coveted Credit Risk category for the first time. Thanks to all our customers for voting for us. This is truly a great honour for us and we’re proud to continue to serve you.
Training Programme
Plan for classroom style training days are in progress, targeting this summer for the first one. We will offer 1 day training sessions for up to 10 delegates where the attendees will get in depth training of all aspects of the cube platform from some of our product specialists.
Reach out to us if you have any specific training requirements.