FinTech’s potential for commodity pricing

EIT Digital Summer School
summerschool@eitdigital.eu

Prof. Ziba Habibi Lashkari from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid is an instructor delivering one of the EIT Digital FinTech Summer Schools. She believes that FinTech has a huge impact on every area of business. Here she explains the potential of one application of FinTech that was the topic of her doctoral thesis, improving the field of commodity pricing.

"Trading commodities has been a part of human life from the very beginning. I have been working on commodity pricing and the prediction of market price, especially in oil and gas, for several years. Besides financial and economic concepts, I have used mathematics, differential equations, and time series in my research".

Market price prediction using, or primarily based on, the traditional model is inaccurate; you cannot be sure about the results. One of the main reasons for this problem is the relation between market movements, as even everyday political and economic news from around the world can influence a change in the market price of a commodity. The second main reason for the inaccuracy of the traditional model is information. Information, and access to the information, is the key to trading.

Our most recent efforts to solve these two major problems is evidenced by the rapid development and growth of financial technology - or "FinTech" - to streamline and improve the trading process, making it faster, easier, and much more accurate.

FinTech in energy pricing

As an example, we are now watching the effects of increasing inflation as a result of event markers in energy, which is among the most important sectors in modern economics. In response, FinTech companies work to try to predict inflationary pressures while also investing in the search for better solutions to address this problem.

Crude production and price within the energy sector is a key driver of inflation. As technology moves forward, the analysis of price formation becomes vital in determining the methods in which FinTech companies invest, to predict, and counter, inflationary pressures within the energy sector. As this commodity is used in almost every industrial and commercial sector, this is of great interest to traders who look at daily - or weekly - fluctuations in the price of crude oil.

Using blockchain and AI technology, big data corporations are now producing new applications to improve the decision-making process for investing. These technologies work by analysing all the relevant data in the market, much more quickly than a standard human, to provide the investor with the best advice regarding their investments.

By providing a global digital system that is available to everyone around the world, this technology expands and extends the accessibility of these systems beyond solely wealthy individuals and corporations, to everyone who has access to a smartphone and the internet.

The FinTech revolution is still relatively new. We need to give this technology the chance to grow more in order for us to fully realize a faster, easier, safer, and more accurate process in the commodity trading market.

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