Data intelligence provider CargoMetrics Technologies is continuing its rollout of maritime-focused products with two innovative solutions that zero in on ship emissions and the European Union’s Emission Trading System.
The Boston-based former hedge fund has been able to release 30 distinct products in the commodities and environmental-impact spaces since April 2023 and shows little sign of slowing down.
“We’ll continue with the same pace of product release this year,” chief executive Jes Scully told TradeWinds.
CargoMetrics’ Maritime Emissions-Global Benchmark provides carbon emissions and fuel consumption metrics by vessel class in tankers, dry bulk and container ships, and also by vessel size. They include measures of carbon emissions per nautical mile, tonne-mile and container unit.
The EU ETS Carbon Tracker product reports maritime carbon emissions in tonnes per day subject to the bloc’s closely watched greenhouse gas trading scheme.
Both products were introduced in the early months of 2024.
“The interest and activity and customer sign-up has been strong,” Scully said.
The global benchmark product has been targeted primarily at shipowners, operators and cargo owners.
“They have goals and objectives around their emission targets and their progress toward them,” Scully said.
“If a shipping company operates supramax vessels, for example, how does it compare to the rest of the supramax fleet? We can put their operation in context from the standpoint of CO2 emissions and fuel-oil consumption by vessel, cargo miles and container unit [teu].”
CargoMetrics has seen additional interest from “a financial and insurance base”, Scully said, in that insurers are contemplating offering discount rates to owners operating environmentally friendly vessels, and likewise banks lower financing costs on a similar basis.
Addressing regulatory shifts
The EU emissions trading product, of course, is particularly pertinent given the recent introduction of the system and the impact already being felt across shipping.
Scully described the target market as “discretionary traders, hedge funds and other investment firms”.
He said the development of portfolio and investment strategies is “not unlike” the market for freight forward agreements. “Carbon is likely to take a similar path,” he said.
Together, the two products “provide customers with the clarity needed to make data-driven assessments related to maritime emissions and carbon trading in their voluntary, compliance, and speculative applications”, Scully said.
As TradeWinds reported in March 2023, CargoMetrics’ first step into providing data for broad distribution was its Crude Pack, which crunched an ocean of data points from the tanker trade and provided it to customers through their Bloomberg machines.
Last May, the company rolled out three more products: the Iron Ore Pack, LNG Pack and LPG Pack.
The products are built for a variety of applications, from driving quantitative trading strategies to informing financial research and measuring the impact of trade disruptions or geopolitical events.
It has selected the trades to follow by combining its previous experience, using its proprietary data as a hedge fund with $250m of assets under management, and by listening to the traders and financial players that are its data customers.
