Funds management firm eliminates 'key man risk'

25.10.2006
Australian-based commodity future advisors Global Commodities has rolled out Aussie designed software to automatically manage customer investment funds without the need to hire more staff.

Global Commodities monitors 22 markets broken up into four commodities and specifically needed an application to interrogate data relating to commodity exchanges and determine if various prices show value and are a worthy investment.

In 2005 Global Commodities approached local development firm Groundhog to build an application to manage funds in excess of A$1 billion (US$757 million) so the company did not need to hire more staff.

The software, called Commager, had to be specifically designed to eliminate the risk associated with only one person within Global Commodities knowing how to use it, and one developer knowing how it was built.

Global Commodities CEO Greg Smith said essentially they wanted a robust, bullet proof application that does not need a team of people to extract information from it.

"Commager assists us in two ways; firstly it eliminates "key man risk" - the dependence on a specialist employee - because any member of our staff can run the application, and also it means we don't need a large workforce to manage the capital as we currently have a team of five experienced people," Smith said.