Zema Global & SEFE: Case Study

SEFE Marketing & Trading Limited is the global trading arm of SEFE Securing Energy for Europe (SEFE). It operates across global energy markets - trading physical and financial products including gas, power, LNG, and environmental commodities. With deep experience in derivatives, logistics, and risk management, SEFE Marketing & Trading serves a broad customer base from industrial companies to municipal utilities, helping them manage exposure and value in volatile energy markets. Building on over 20 years of expertise, SEFE applies analytics and integrated trading to optimize energy f lows, manage risk, and support the evolution toward a more sustainable energy system.

Zema Global enables SEFE to centralize data for faster decision-making and smarter trading

Summary:

Facing increasingly complex energy market demands, SEFE Marketing & Trading set out to strengthen the way it manages vast, time-critical data streams. Implementing Zema Enterprise enabled the company to centralize more than 70,000 data curves into a single, robust platform — enhancing real-time trading decisions, portfolio optimization, and overall operational efficiency. With improved visibility, standardized processes, and closer coordination with vendors, SEFE can now adapt swiftly to market developments such as the EU’s 15-minute trading unit — further reinforcing supply security and reducing operational risk. 

Origination and trading for energy security and market stability

As a leading cross-commodity energy trading company, SEFE Marketing & Trading operates under close market and stakeholder scrutiny, making operational excellence essential at every level of the business.

The company has grown into one of Europe’s largest commodity traders and is a key player in European gas and power markets. From its base in the UK, with offices across Europe and in Singapore, it conducts physical and f inancial trading of LNG, natural gas, power and environmental products. Each year, SEFE trades approximately 170 TWh of power and 2,600 TWh of natural gas, and delivers over 130 LNG cargoes.

Managing volumes

In today’s energy markets, trading is as much about managing information as moving molecules, with every flow, weather shift, and signal generating data that must be understood in real time.

As Cuan Brown, Executive Vice President of Trading IT, says: “We need accurate data to make fast trading decisions and to guarantee long-term operational stability.”

Looking at SEFE’s European gas and power trades gives an idea of the volumes of data involved. SEFE gathers information on gas f lows, temperatures and pressure across thousands of natural gas pipelines in Europe in 15-minute increments, as well as grid and load data from European power markets. These data points can go back as far as 10 years and project up to 15 years into the future. Analysts add weather information, customer demand data, and historical datasets, in addition to the prices for various primary and secondary markets so that its energy portfolio can be profitably optimized before it reaches the final consumer.  

Visibility and value

The data management system available to SEFE until recently had been built on an ad-hoc basis, relying on hundreds of small, disconnected data tools. Developers would scrape data from websites, download FTP files or PDFs, or reformat data from emails so that trading analysts and front-office teams could use them effectively.  

“Most of the incidents we had across our trading landscape were data related. Every time a priority one incident was raised — something that critically impacted an operational process — the culprit was inaccurate, missing or untimely data,” says Cuan. “Without sufficient alerting or visibility, the team had to spend considerable time resolving these issues, which increased operational overheads. This made clear the need for a more robust, automated approach.”

SEFE also had to keep the relevant grid operators informed of its physical trades to support load balancing and maintain system stability. Given the potential financial and operational implications of any imbalance, robust coordination is essential. “We needed tools to consolidate our market and pricing information and to enhance transparency and coordination across our operations,” says Cuan.

Zema Enterprise enhances decision-making

After an extensive selection process, SEFE chose Zema Enterprise to centralize the acquisition and management of its data and to support market analysis and pricing activity across its gas and power trading portfolios. “It was the most advanced solution available on the market, offering the maturity and functionality we required,” says Cuan.  

Collecting and synthesizing pre- and post-trade data from 100+ different sources (70k curves), Zema Enterprise is now one of the primary tools in SEFE’s marketing and trading operations. It supplies the key market data that SEFE uses for trading decision-making, portfolio optimization and valuing financial positions.

 “Our commercial value comes from how we use data — not from manually managing integration and standardization. Zema Global streamlines that process, giving us standardized, aggregated data our systems can use instantly. That means we can focus on what makes our added value: analysis and trading decisions,” says Cuan. It also helps SEFE manage operational risk by quickly identifying data failures and facilitating communication with vendors. “We get an alert, and we can then immediately confirm what is About Zema Global going on with the vendor,” says Cuan. “We don’t have to hunt through 70,000 curves to identify the problem.”  

“Zema Enterprise provides SEFE with fully integrated data acquisition, repository, administration and management. It has effectively industrialized our data operations to support trading, analytics, decision-making and the movement of gas and power across Europe,” says Cuan.

Grid optimization and a changing market

Throughout the relationship, SEFE has regularly engaged with Zema Global’s support teams. Most recently, the team has adapted its systems to reflect the European power market’s transition from 30-minute to 15-minute trading intervals, including the resulting changes to data flows and data management processes.

“The Zema Global team have helped us collate the data we need from vendors. With the regulatory changes now in place, we’re well positioned to support the ongoing optimization of European energy grids and contribute to lowering CO2 emissions and costs,” says Cuan. 

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