Electronic Warehouse Receipts

ForumCommodity is an Electronic Warehouse Receipts system, including commodity exchange software,designed from the ground up, to be a versatile solution for the registration, life cycle management, funding, trading, and settlement of electronic warehouse receipts, with an integral registry and depository.
It also provides support solutions for producers including farmer databases, market price collection and reporting.

The system was initially designed in conjunction with commodity exchange experts, based on their experience of operating the most successful such exchanges in Africa.

The system delivers full management of the lifecycle of warehouse receipts, including:

  • Grading and acceptance
  • Issuance
  • Charges and fees
  • Commodity attributes e.g. Moisture content or gold purity
  • Finance 
  • Addition of new deposits
  • Withdrawals, sales, transfers
  • Warehouse management

ForumCommodity has a modern, browser-based, user-interface which is accessible from computers, tablets and smartphones. It also enables appropriate data and functions to be accessible using simple feature phones (using SMS), to support the wider farming communities.

Electronic warehouse receipts at GMEX

Functionality modules include:

Trading – The system currently supports five forms of trading with ForumMatchLite:

  • Central Limit Order Book (CLOB)
  • Auctions
  • Request-for-Quote (RFQ)
  • Block Book
  • OTC Trade Reporting

Market data – Outbound market data can be disseminated to data consumers, such as groups of farmers, who want the latest reported price updates from both the trading platform and from any OTC trades on the platform. Price updates can be received on desktops, smart phones and tablets and can be extended to SMS based on defined criteria.
Product life cycle – This module facilitates the creation and ongoing management of electronic warehouse receipts.
Funding – This module allows the operator to monitor bank or alternative financing for participants, including farmers. The warehouse receipts act as secured collateral with an appropriate haircut.
Registry – This module facilitates the registry and depository of warehouse receipts in both traditional form and digital tokenised form to facilitate settlement. It includes associated data such as stakeholders and instrument data.
Interfaces – The system can be accessed and operated via multiple interfaces including:

  • Front-end GUI
  • FIX API
  • Reports
  • CSV File Upload