Trafigura Tamper-Proofs Global Trade Audit Trail for Millions of Barrels of Oil and Tons of Concentrates
 
 

Trafigura Tamper-Proofs Global Trade Audit Trail for Millions of Barrels of Oil and Tons of Concentrates

  • Oracle Customer:  Trafigura
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Oil and Gas
    Employees:  6,000
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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Trafigura is the world’s third-largest independent oil trader and the second-largest independent trader in nonferrous concentrates. With 67 offices in 44 countries worldwide, the company handles every element involved in sourcing and trading crude oil, petroleum products, renewable energies, metals, metal ores, coal, and nonferrous concentrates for industrial consumers.

Capitalizing on its resource trading and investment expertise, Trafigura has also diversified into asset management through its wholly-owned subsidiary Galena Asset Management, which develops offshore hedge funds and has more than U$1.2 billion in funds currently under management.

Trafigura trades more than 9 million tons of concentrates each year and more than 2.5 million barrels of crude and oil products daily. With its huge daily transaction volume, Trafigura needed a reliable audit trail to show all historical trading activity. Previously, the company saved historical transactions in a number of ways in various locations, making it difficult to access one accurate picture of activity. In addition, it took considerable time and effort to collect and consolidate year-end data for financial and audit requirements.

Trafigura implemented Oracle Total Recall as part of its global strategy to consolidate applications onto Oracle Database. Oracle Total Recall provides automatic, tamper-proof records of all historical transactions, with straightforward data access for audit or business intelligence purposes.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Trafigura

  • "Oracle Total Recall is completely tamper-proof. It is impossible to remove data. Once the data is archived, it is effectively read-only. No other audit solution provides this level of security." – Dean Logan Wood, Global Head of Database Technology, Trafigura

  • Implement a comprehensive auditing system as part of the strategic program to replace legacy systems and migrate trading platforms from Microsoft SQL Server, consolidating them on Oracle Database
  • Standardize processes to ensure that historical transactions relating to previous trading of oil and nonferrous concentrates can be accessed centrally
  • Meet Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulatory requirements for asset management businesses to maintain a true and clear picture of past activity
  • Ensure that the infrastructure is in place to meet any future regulatory requirements for the commodity trading part of the organization
  • Simplify auditing with automated storage and backup of historical transactions, as well as straightforward access to data
  • Reduce time and money for managing, programming, and extracting information for audit purposes
  • Improve security by ensuring that historical trading data cannot be accidently or deliberately changed or removed

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Total Recall to automatically manage the audit trail to provide detailed information about historical trading of assets, oil and nonferrous concentrates
  • Simplified the collection, collation, and management of historical data with automatic processes inherent in Oracle Total Recall, functions that previously would have been coded and built in-house
  • Reduced physical storage cost associated with archiving copies of databases and history in duplicate
  • Ensured the asset management business in compliance with Financial Services Authority (FSA) regulations by providing tamper-proof, automatic recording of all historical transactions and straightforward data access for audit purposes
  • Established good data management practices for the commodity trading business in anticipation of tighter regulations in the future
  • Saved work weeks of time for two full-time DBAs on end-of-the-year data collection, as they can now pull all the necessary year-end information instantaneously from one source
  • Saved hundreds of work days related to managing, programming, and extracting information from a range of databases for audit purposes
  • Enabled traders to easily analyze past trading performance for assets, oil, and nonferrous concentrates and make better-informed buying and selling decisions in the future due to improved historical data accessible from one central source
  • Improved security as Oracle Total Recall is entirely tamper-proof; data is essentially read-only, and it cannot be removed or altered in any way once written

Why Oracle

Trafigura needed to put an auditing platform in place as part of a strategic move to consolidate all applications onto Oracle Database. It carried out a short proof of concept and found that Oracle Total Recall provided the functionality required to manage Trafigura’s audit history.

“Oracle Total Recall is easy to implement and use, and it has no negative impact on application performance. Because it is a self-managing product, we do not have to think about history or auditing," said Dean Logan Wood, global head of database technology, Trafigura. "Everything is done automatically. We no longer need to take snapshots of activity at the quarter- or year-end. We can now run a query and extract the data we need instantly. Further, as we move more legacy applications to Oracle, end-of-year processes become easier to manage for the IT department, saving time and money.”