A Common Trade Repository

ChorusLink represents a new approach to recording, storing and managing energy trade data and related information – in a common trade repository. Each trade is only captured once as a single data object, with the platform ensuring that both parties involved in the transaction read the same data.

The shared information held in ChorusLink is therefore mutually confirmed by definition, simplifying auditing, regulatory reporting as well as the other steps in the lifecycle of a transaction necessitating mutual data verification.

Private data from both parties is linked to the shared trade object, allowing ChorusLink to be used as the complete trade repository for external, market-facing trades. In addition to the automatic inherent trade matching brought by this approach, ChorusLink also automates settlement between its members – and as your counterparties also join the platform, more and more benefits become available to you via increasing network effects.

ChorusLink enables fully secured and controlled data storage in a standardised format, allowing high flexibility for any downstream software.

Central Backbone for Master Data

As a common trade repository, ChorusLink is uniquely positioned as the data backbone for the energy industry, as it also maintains a repository of commonly used master data. These master data are available via externally exposed APIs beyond the ChorusLink application, ensuring that connected downstream systems are continuously updated with the latest master data. This unique approach ensures that members of ChorusLink do not have to spend resources maintaining this data, granting them further cost efficiency in addition to the automated processes for the trade repository.

Applying a New Paradigm

ChorusLink thus proposes a first step to a radical change of paradigm – the move from each market participant owning large and complex system landscapes with individual set up and management of business processes towards subscribing to a common infrastructure with services of getting such processes executed. The main benefits of the new approach are concentrated around cost efficiency and simplification of processes, swift delivery through high levels of standardisation, and a significantly superior system performance.

ChorusLink offers the immediate effect of having a neutral, standardised and highly performant data repository for your energy trades. It allows a standalone setting but can also be combined with Previse Coral and the Previse Coral Ecosystem, with any other front-office tools or with Microsoft Excel (via a plug-in) into complete solutions meeting specific requirements.

Technology

ChorusLink is developed using .Net Core, microservices and Azure functions (serverless computing), optimised for performance and designed for granularities down to 1 minute.

ChorusLink is designed to communicate with the outside world using REST APIs, allowing customers to push data into ChorusLink or to retrieve ChorusLink data and utilize this in any system they prefer.

ChorusLink is delivered as subscription-based Software as a Service (SaaS), hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud. It features continuous delivery and release management down to microservice level, together with built-in automated testing – i.e. entirely avoiding any future (traditional) upgrades of the solution. The design ensures that the solution is state-of-the-art and flexible, but still inexpensive for companies to maintain. Overall, it simplifies the IT landscape and reduced the total cost of ownership significantly.

Joint Ownership

The ChorusLink platform is owned and operated by ChorusLink AG, a Swiss company.

ChorusLink AG is co-owned by its subscribers, i.e. when joining ChorusLink, companies acquire a share in the company. Joint ownership of the platform creates a community among members and promotes a sharing of expenditures related to IT infrastructure where there is no competitive sensitivity. It also ensures full cost transparency in that costs related to ChorusLink directly reflect the infrastructure utilization per member.

The set-up further secures the platform and the entire ChorusLink organisation from any outside control attempts: the storage of essential business data is owned and fully controlled by the companies to whom these data belong.

Implementation Approach

Implementing ChorusLink is a fundamentally different experience compared to setting up traditional enterprise software packages – firstly because ChorusLink already comes with a complete master data repository, and secondly due to the unique concept of market templates, which allows a structured approach to trade data management based on their distinctive characteristics.

ChorusLink can thus serve two main purposes:

  • Master Data Source: ChorusLink serves as a master data source for other enterprise applications, accessible via ChorusLink APIs. Required setup tasks mainly include the review of the master data (to ensure the availability and completeness of required data), as well as the configuration of interfaces based on ChorusLink APIs for automatic data retrieval.
  • Trade Repository: in order for ChorusLink to deploy its core strength as a (common) trade repository, (providing functionalities such as automated trade matching, automated settlement and invoice matching), the second step in setup is trade mapping.

Master Data

ChorusLink provides a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to review available master data and how to add customer-specific master data (such as usernames, generation units, trade books etc.). The ChorusLink Data Gathering Tool ensures easy data upload via the ChorusLink data load APIs.

Trade Data Innovation

The ChorusLink trade repository has been developed around the concept of Market Templates.

Put simply, market templates are used as a means of further categorisation by markets within various types of trades– e.g. as the trade template “GoO trade” defines the required and optional fields on a transaction of guarantees of origin in a generic way, various market templates per specific markets – e.g. German GoOs – categorise trades by further defined attributes such as currency, delivery regulations, eco labels, holiday calendars etc. This allows ChorusLink to import and process trades much more efficiently, and it also plays an important role in trade matching.

The Market Template Mapping Tool facilitates mapping trades to ChorusLink: the applicable market templates are identified via a simple procedure, allowing fast and easy mapping of large volumes of trade data.

Trades are then easily converted from their source to the ChorusLink format using the ChorusLink JSON Trade Creation Tool by providing, for each record:

  • The market template
  • The main fields relevant for trade matching (such as price, quantity, delivery period etc.)
  • Any custom data per party – private data like trade book, comments or similar that is stored in ChorusLink but not shared with counterparties

In order to ensure the trades have been imported into ChorusLink correctly, the ChorusLink Trade List API can be utilised to retrieve the trades from ChorusLink for validation against the source data, either via a custom call or via the ChorusLink Excel Plugin.

The Shared Data Advantage

One of ChorusLink’s core innovations is the sharing of the trade data object between the counterparties. For data migration, this means that once one party has uploaded the trade, the other party (upon also joining ChorusLink) will only need to re-validate the migrated trades. This can happen via trade verification in ChorusLink and electronic matching, or via the upload of a match update by UTI to the ChorusLink Trade Load API. In the same way (updates by UTI), private data can be added to the migrated trade records.

As more and more companies join ChorusLink, the data migration efforts for new subscribers become less and less, as more of their trades will already be on ChorusLink upon their joining.

The Shared Data Approach allows a faster data import processing with significantly less effort as compared to traditional migrations.