 Good morning everyone, my name is Chirag Ahuja, I work as energy trading and risk management consultant with Vipro Technologies. Coming all the way from the Silicon Valley of India, Bangalore, my first time in Singapore, extremely excited to be here and look forward to learn as much and share as much as I know with you all. My topic for today is next generation commodity and energy trading firms and how they are basically viewing the new technologies. As part of my job for the past five years, I have been working very closely with energy and commodity trading companies basically to solve their problems either by implementing the right design approach, putting in the right governance structures in place or leveraging technology to do so. Basically there is a problem in the industry, whether you are a crude oil trader, natural gas, copper, agriculture, rubber, whatever, for the documentation to come all in place today for physical trading requires about a two-week process to get it all consolidated and all in one place. Let me take you through a simple example of this process. So if there is a physical trader, he initiates a trade, goes to the counterparty, the counterparty reviews it and comes back to it. Great, a lot of financial transactions finish there but the problem with the physical trading is you have to actually move the commodity from point A to point B and that's where it gets slightly a bit more complex. What happens is the physical trader then has to review a longer form of the contract with his operator and his contractual department and that creates further documentation in the system and the same thing happens on the other side of the transaction. That guy over there has to do it with his trader and they review this clause by clause for each person. If this is boring then a lot more happens all around, I won't get into that. Basically an operator, someone who actually takes care of all the documentation, handles about a good operator, handles about 30 to 50 shipments every month. Now if you take this as a base report of 20 documents per trade, per movement, you can exponentially scale how much of documentation accuracy is required and this just gets even more complex because you have to communicate between different channels and it changes every time. So what do we do about this? First of all you see a lot of this process is still archaic, laws and processes in place are still 150 years old and haven't really changed much. The process is painfully slow in today's commodity trading world and in the world we live in. It's extremely labor intensive, there are dedicated back offices which just take care of these reports, do the settlements, invoicing and ensure that you have accuracy in information because billions of dollars are at stake here with respect to every trade. The system because of all these faults is extremely prone to fraud and there have been enough number of cases in the past where fraudulent transactions have taken place. It's opaque in nature and operationally quite expensive because of the other factors. So this is basically the problem here. Before we look into what we're sort of doing at Wipro with our clients, let me just take you through a small story. So there was in one of the design teams while they were planning to build one of the largest refineries in the world, a designer got up and said, well, let's have a goal that this entire refinery with all its complexities can be run by a dog. So the other engineer got up and asked, whoa, what do you mean it should be run by a dog? What will man do? So the designer said the man will feed the dog and with that approach extrapolating it and bringing in that level of automation, let's see what we can do. First of all, if you see, if there was a possibility that refineries or food processing companies could post a set of order transactions onto a platform and then trading companies could build algorithms which rank these orders posted based upon their algorithm of which they can fulfill. And of course, this algorithm will be a cost minimizing function and yet take care of the multitude and magnitude of economic factors at play. The resulting output would probably spit out an offer price for those crude oil posts along with a dollar value plus a delivery location and specified time and so on. It's possible that the same competitive spirit will cascade onto other members within the chain such as insurance companies, inspectors, brokers, vessel operators and so on. Insurance companies could be given the opportunity because you could build a credit layer analytics on top of this where real life performance of these different assets feed back into the identity of every real life performing asset and therefore gives it a credit score thereby allowing you to add a fair dollar value insurance to every transaction. You can imagine a galaxy of IoT sensors measuring quality, quantity and other specs which are then fed into the contractual clauses which then trigger certain events based upon those clauses. If pilots of this nature succeed, there is a huge potential to create an ecosystem where developers could build apps on top of this. Let me give you a small example. For example, building a distribution application where you could charge a fee from food processing companies who would love the data that you collect from users on their dietary intake because that allows them to optimize their supply chain better and you could pass on that revenue onto the masses thereby flipping the entire revenue model which we hear of using the possibility of the blockchain platform. Of course, this particular use case problem won't be the single one. It has to be operatable with other use cases which are being built out there currently. Some will focus just on finance, some will focus just on vessel operations, ours will focus just on documentation and so on and so forth. So interoperatability between the different platforms will be a key for success. Based upon our experience, what we think are the principles for a successful commodity trading blockchain platform number one, collaborative. If it's a consortium based, even if it's open source, you have to have collaboration among all parties within that consortium. You should have a view of singularity. That is all the functionality you agree upon before you build on the chain. Definitely open source, not just in terms of tech, but in terms of business use. A lot of business users are not able to transact or move or take part in the commodity value chain just because it's so labor intensive as well as so capitalized. Of course, like any other blockchain platform, you have to be very, very appreciative of privacy and in this case, it becomes even more important. Interoperatively, obviously, and education, I think, is a must need of TR, not just for new age developers, but also for people within the business to understand what benefits can this platform bring to you. Being a risk guy, I always think like what can go wrong? So primary reason is regulators don't play ball. They simply don't come up on board. Number two, technology limits. One of the reasons I'm also here is because I want to understand how far can you push this tech to. There is low acceptance of the platform. Across the different business users and finally, if there's a massive price crash, it removes the innovation budget, which does not let you create cool stuff like this. But want to finish on a happy note, what can go right? There's the mass adoption of this new world platform. The tech continues to grow exponentially. Singapore is a hub for blockchain right now. All the cool stuff really happens here. And there's support of the community to build this going forward. This would result in a massive drop in cost of operations, making commodities cheaper across the globe. Of course, it creates a flourishing new ecosystem where developers, business users come together and build apps, which then build a new stream of revenues for everyone within the ecosystem. With that, thank you for listening to me. And I look forward to interact with you. Thank you. What have you actually implemented in the blockchain so far? So we've done a pilot for a few consortiums. And overall, as a company, we've done about, I think, over 50 projects, all proof of concepts. And specifically within the energy place, I have been involved in three. Could you talk about those? Well, this was the sort of problem statement we were trying to solve. And I think more than that, I'm not sure how much I could talk. But I could probably one-on-one with you and have that. But yeah, the meat of the problem is this, there are open white papers out there which talk about it. Yeah, but what I see is, what is in production as well? Yeah, this is a proof of concept. I'm hearing words, but what has been implemented, what is in production, what are the tech problems you faced? Right. OK. Well, from the business end, this was it. And I'd love to share more after. Yeah, so in fact, a multitude of factors were at play to choose the right platform. And in fact, we've still not got there. It's we don't know which one to go with. While our pilots were done on few platforms, there are certain startups who have their own platform. We tried with that as well. So we don't know which one to go with yet. But I think we'll eventually choose one in the coming few weeks. OK. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.