Who are you and what does your business do?
My name is Bawe Salehi. I work for AFS Energies, a sustainability provider in continental Europe. As a Senior Sustainability Advisor, part of my job is to procure sustainability certificates such as Guarantees of Origin (GOs) for our clients.
What challenges does ASF face in energy markets?
The main challenges we faced were prices and transparency. If you know the GO market, you know it is pretty much impossible to find benchmark prices as trades happen just between a buyer and seller. That makes it really hard to know the real value of a GO. But then, we got in contact with Montel Marketplace and that all changed.
How does Montel Marketplace offer something unique?
Nowhere else publishes the prices for agreed trades, so it brings a whole new level of transparency to the GO market. As a trader, I think the major point is the reduced stress. We don't need to call around the whole European market when we can just put the prices on Marketplace and people either react on their interest or give information about it.
Our experience has been 10 out of 10 so far - and it's something we are recommending on a daily basis to both our clients and counterparts - encouraging them to put in prices on there and perhaps trade there as well.
What attracted AFS to Montel News?
We were already using other Montel services every day, so when we heard about Marketplace it made sense for us to use it. I think the pricing history is very valuable to be able to inform our customers, as well as the different types of GOs and even the new Request for Quote feature. With this, you can just state your needs and another party can express their interest, it's doing the hard work for you.
What do you value most working with us?
The platform is great and it enables us to trade in a way we never could before, but I like the experts you have working around Marketplace too. We have had a lot of contact with both Laura and Zeki who are very knowledgeable about the GO market, which makes it much easier to find other parties willing to trade GOs. And this is key, as the more companies that trade on Marketplace, the greater the market liquidity and transparency will become.
Interested in trading Guarantees of Origin?