Maximizing Profits and Minimizing Risk in the Creation and Execution of Structured Retail Energy Deals
With the combination of thin retail margins, complex pricing options, and ever-present price volatility, creating and executing complex structured deals demands perfect execution. Today's retail transactions require the same speed, precision, real-time transaction management and straight-through processing that traders demand in wholesale markets. Yet most energy marketers are still using the kind of manual, spreadsheet based processes that put their bottom line at tremendous risk.

Typical Problems and Pain Points in the Execution of Structured Pricing Deals:
Market Risk
The time delay between quote and acceptance can introduce enough price risk to turn a money making deal into a money losing deal before the ink is dry on the contract.

Massive Amounts of Data
Creating structured deals requires access to and assimilation of tremendous amounts of information such as interval data, forward pricing, product offerings, and customer data. Consolidating this information from external sources and separate databases can be difficult and time consuming.

Manual Workflow and Calculations
For many energy retailers, workflow in the pricing process consists of populating and routing manual spreadsheets. This process is slow and error-prone. In addition, tracking forward positions, originating margins, and even sales commissions becomes a difficult, labor-intensive process.

Lack of Controls
Maintaining consistency in your margin strategy, pricing options, term, and risk acceptance requires the use of centralized controls. Today's environment of a distributed sales force and manual processes makes this method difficult and risky.

Delays in Responding to Customers
A typical response time in getting a quote back to a customers is measured in days - sometimes even in weeks - which puts you at a competitive disadvantage.

No Audit Trails
Manual processes do not create reliable audit trails, making it problematic to reconstruct deals for analysis, difficult to resolve disputes with customers, and harder and harder to comply with stricter corporate and regulatory reporting requirements. Additionally, Sarbanes-Oxley enforcement will continue to pressure energy suppliers to provide accurate, auditable, real-time reporting.

Introducing A Better Way to Offer Customers Structured Pricing
Excelergy® HedgeDirect™ is a real-time transaction management platform that provides complete automation in the quoting, execution, confirmation and contract management of structured retail pricing for power and gas. Quotes, offers, acceptance, deal capture and reporting are all processed in real-time. End-to-end, straight-through processing provides the link between trading and retail, which offers complete salesforce automation, minimizes manual errors, reduces time delays between offer and execution, avoids disputes, automatically enters retail positions into your wholesale trading system and provides detailed auditing for financial performance, commission plans, accounting and regulatory reporting. Excelergy HedgeDirect helps you to maximize profits and minimize risks on all your structured deals. Excelergy HedgeDirect is offered as a complete managed service or as a standard application license.

HedgeDirect components include:
CurveMaker
CurveMaker allows you to build and maintain dynamic forward pricing curves utilizing live market feeds. These curves are then used to automatically feed into retail pricing algorithms. You can automatically imbed bid/offer spreads by order size, and create a full audit log on all pricing and price changes.

PricingWizard
PricingWizard allows you to create and offer unlimited pricing products (fixed price, blend/extend, caps, collars, etc.) and generate structured customer quotes at the click of a button. Each individual customer account can be provided with definable limits, rules, and products. Centralized control lets you limit, start, or stop pricing by customer, group, or product. PricingWizard gives your sales group full margin management capability and the ability to track and report sales rep commissions.

Credit and Finance Manager
Credit and Finance Manager lets you create and assign credit classes to each customer account. You can imbed premiums and control activity by credit class. You can even input cost of capital and recover finance charges with average price deals.

Deal Capture
With Deal Capture, you can record all pricing components in each deal and maintain a real-time consolidated hedge book view with full drill down capability for use in forecasting and risk management. Deal Capture also provides automated electronic transfer of all pricing data to your billing system.

Contract Manager
Contract Manager module allows you to store and maintain electronic customer contracts. You can create proposals, contracts, pricing addendums, and deal sheets. You can even provide electronic confirmations with email notifications.

Market Clearing Option
The Market Clearing Option facilitates real-time clearing of all orders through designated third parties. It also eliminates holding risks associated with small and odd lot orders, and allows you to balance your hedge book in real-time.