There simply is no alternative out there, it’s either you collect all the data from different sources or you get AgFlow.
AgFlow is the most complete spot and forward cash price data provider we could find.
Harm de Wilde
Agri-commodity Market Analyst at Cefetra BV
Cefetra is a Rotterdam based company and is part of the German Group BayWa. The company is the industry leader in the supply of raw materials for the animal feed sector in the European Union, with more than 120 years of experience in agriculture and international trade.
Cefetra’s challenge
As the leading feed trading company in Europe, Cefetra needed a solution to track spot and forward prices across agricultural commodities. At Cefetra, the Market Research team is led by Harm de Wilde and includes one data engineer, two fundamental market analysts as well as two quantitative analysts. Harm de Wilde’s team is responsible for supporting around 80 traders by enabling them to keep a finger on the spot and forward market movements at all times. The market research team ensures business intelligence on Cefetra’s internal reporting dashboards.
Before working with AgFlow’s API, the market research team was sourcing cash prices through Reuters, EKA, and other public sources for forward curves. Their data engineer had to manually gather, structure, and transform the data. Much of this data was coming in different formats such as PDFs, Spreadsheets, or Emails, which could take up to a week’s worth of work data standardization per source. This method did not provide them with enough flexibility and required significant data-processing efforts. As a result, Cefetra was struggling to have an accurate idea about how cash prices were doing on the spot and forward months. In a nutshell, the need to optimize the process was pressing.
AgFlow’s solution for Cefetra
Cefetra bought API access to AgFlow’s database, calling spot and forward prices for over 60 commodities. Cefetra also now have access to AgFlow’s freight and cash price database, which enables the market research team to track forward curves and thus eliminate the need to contact a plethora of sources to collect the data. It’s now accessible in one place by API access.
Cefetra chose AgFlow because it was the most competitive solution available on the market.
Nick Valstar said: “This is what I really like about AgFlow, it’s the API. We can do whatever we want, we can compare it with whatever, make charts. That’s a great thing.”
Results
Since getting the API access to AgFlow’s database, Cefetra not only eliminated the need for data collection but also benefits from robust and standardized data nomenclature. Where they would previously have to spend time cleaning and standardizing data, they can now directly get to work.
As Nick Valstar says: “AgFlow helps me to have some sort of basis because you always find the correct names for ports and countries. The other sources I use all have different names for the same port or country. Some say “Argentina”, others “Argentine”, and you even see “ARG”. The other sources that I gather I know also try to match to the AgFlow structure. It’s a golden standard.”
AgFlow is a Trusted data provider for these leading teams.
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