An Interview with Aakash Kakkad, Senior Solutions Engineer at BroadPeak
ComTech Advisory: Who is BroadPeak and what does the firm do?
Aakash: BroadPeak provides data and intelligence solutions for energy and commodity trading firms. Our clients include trading houses, utilities, producers, refiners, and financial institutions operating across physical and derivatives markets. They typically trade across multiple venues and asset classes and rely on accurate, real-time trade data to support trading, risk management, and regulatory obligations.
With certified connectivity to more than 100 global exchanges and brokers through standard protocols including API, FIX, XML, CSV, Kafka, and Message Queue, BroadPeak delivers clean, structured trade data in real time.
Data integration serves as the foundation for BroadPeak’s suite of solutions, which includes Trade Capture, Trade Reconciliation, Trade Allocation, Position Limits, Regulatory Reporting, and Trade Surveillance.
BroadPeak is designed to eliminate manual data work and reduce operational risk across trading, risk, and compliance teams so clients can focus on what matters most, profitable trading.
ComTech Advisory: What markets and problems does it focus on?`
Aakash: BroadPeak addresses the data, trading, and post-trade challenges faced by energy and commodity trading firms across oil, gas, power, renewables, metals, agriculture, and other global markets. These firms rely on fast, accurate, real-time data from multiple exchanges, brokers, and internal systems, but in practice this data is often fragmented, inconsistent, and hard to integrate.
BroadPeak solves these challenges with a suite of integrated solutions built for the complexity of energy and commodities: fast, flexible data integration; real-time trade capture; trade reconciliation and allocation; position-limit monitoring; regulatory reporting; and centralized trade surveillance.
By unifying data and automating critical workflows, BroadPeak helps clients operate more efficiently, gain clearer visibility into positions and risk, satisfy regulatory requirements with less friction, and scale across new asset classes and venues without heavy IT investment.
ComTech Advisory: What does it see as its key differentiator?
Aakash: BroadPeak sets itself apart by solving the data and workflow challenges that make energy and commodity trading complex. Our solutions are built on a unified, real-time data foundation that connects exchanges, brokers, E/CTRMs, and internal systems. This foundation eliminates fragmentation, reduces operational risk, and supports every stage of the trading lifecycle, from capture and allocation to reconciliation, surveillance, position limits, and regulatory reporting.
A key differentiator is BroadPeak’s fast, flexible Data Integration solution. Implementations are fast with plug-and-play connectivity to any E/CTRM. The low-code solution allows business users, not just IT, to manage workflows.
Direct access to normalized trade data supports investigations, analytics, and historical queries, while clients can connect their own BI and risk tools for transparent, self-service workflows.
Through certified connections to over 100 exchanges and brokers worldwide, BroadPeak delivers instant, real-time access to trading data across all markets and instruments. Data flows seamlessly to E/CTRMs, risk platforms, analytics tools, or centralized repositories, ensuring every team has timely, accurate information.
For position limits, BroadPeak’s reference data engine, Atlas, collects actual exchange-published data daily, covering millions of data points and capturing complex rules such as diminishing factors, parent-child groupings, and delta-based calculations.
For trade surveillance, centralized trade data allows firms to calibrate alerts, reduce noise, and focus on high-risk activity. By linking physical and financial trading, BroadPeak enables detection of cross-market behaviors that few systems can identify.
BroadPeak also streamlines regulatory reporting, reconciliation, and trade allocation. Automated pipelines move trades directly from the system of record to swap data repositories, reducing manual effort and error. Reconciliation aligns FCM, exchange, and E/CTRM data to deliver accurate end-of-day positions. Dynamic trade allocation aggregates and splits fills, ensuring trades are booked correctly, minimizing operational overhead, and preserving clean audit trails.
By combining these capabilities, BroadPeak delivers a scalable, flexible platform that gives energy and commodity trading firms confidence, control, and transparency in fast-moving, complex markets.
ComTech Advisory: Where does its platform and solutions add value?
Aakash: BroadPeak adds value across the entire trading lifecycle for energy and commodity firms by addressing the complexity, fragmentation, and operational risks inherent in global markets. At the core is the data integration foundation that consolidates trade data from exchanges, brokers, E/CTRMs, and internal systems. This provides a single, reliable source of truth that underpins all trading, risk, compliance, and operational processes.
Key areas of value include:
- Trade capture and integration: Direct, certified connections to 100+ exchanges and brokers worldwide capture trades across all asset classes in real time. Data flows accurately and completely into downstream systems, reducing errors and operational overhead.
- Data accessibility and analytics: Normalized, structured data is available for direct use by business users, analysts, and developers. This accelerates investigations, reporting, and analytics while supporting self-service workflows, custom risk models, and AI initiatives.
- Post-trade efficiency: Automated trade reconciliation, allocation, and position-limit monitoring eliminate manual and error-prone processes. This reduces operational risk, ensures accurate end-of-day positions, and provides clear audit trails for compliance and reporting.
- Regulatory compliance: Automated, end-to-end regulatory reporting and centralized trade surveillance help clients meet obligations efficiently while providing visibility into potential market abuse and risk exposure.
- Scalability and flexibility: Low-code, feed-agnostic architecture allows firms to onboard new venues, instruments, or workflows quickly, supporting growth and adaptation to changing market conditions and/or regulatory requirements.
ComTech Advisory: What is BroadPeak doing in terms of AI?
Aakash: The problem with AI projects in energy and commodity trading is not the technology, it is the data. Many firms are running AI trials right now and getting limited results because they are feeding their models incomplete, inconsistent data from E/CTRMs that were never designed for AI consumption. When you feed an LLM data with missing tags, conflicting timestamps, and format mismatches, you get answers, but they are wrong. By the time you notice the subtle errors in risk calculations or surveillance alerts, you have already made decisions based on bad outputs.
BroadPeak does not build AI models. We have built the data infrastructure that makes AI work in energy and commodity trading.
Our Data Integration solution sits between your E/CTRM and AI systems, extracting data from across your trading stack and normalizing everything into a single, structured format that AI can consume directly. We resolve format mismatches, standardize timestamps to a single time zone, fill in missing fields, and track every field back to its source for full auditability. Your data stays in your environment, nothing goes to external AI platforms.
Once that clean data layer exists, you can run AI workflows that deliver results: anomaly detection, forecasting, surveillance models, risk analysis, workload automation. All built on the same foundation. Your compliance team gets stronger auditability, risk gets clearer exposure views, trading gets faster access to trade context, and IT stops maintaining broken ETL pipelines.
Without clean, structured data, AI becomes unusable. BroadPeak gives trading firms that foundation without ripping out their existing systems. We are not replacing your E/CTRM or launching a multi-year modernization program. We are adding the layer that makes your current infrastructure work with AI, so your models can skip the cleaning phase and go straight to generating insights.
ComTech Advisory: What are the next developments for the company?
Aakash:
Trade Surveillance: BroadPeak is advancing its surveillance capabilities with the introduction of ML-based alert scoring. The aim is not to replace existing detection logic but to make it more effective so clients can prioritize alerts based on risk characteristics, behavioral patterns, and historical outcomes. This will reduce false positives and improve investigation efficiency.
We are also expanding the breadth and depth of the market data we integrate, giving surveillance teams richer context for anomaly detection, and expanding coverage into ISO/RTO markets. This brings physical power trading into scope, allowing clients to analyze physical and financial activity within a single framework.
Position Limits: We are rolling out a major redesign of our Position Limits solution to deliver a unified, modern interface for position-limit monitoring, reporting, and investigations. Alongside this, we are advancing toward real-time limit monitoring, with instant alerts when thresholds approach or breach.
BroadPeak is also introducing support for custom, internally defined limits for instruments without exchange-published limits. This will give firms the flexibility to monitor internal thresholds and client-specific requirements directly within the platform.
Data Integration: BroadPeak is expanding its adapter library to strengthen the full trade-data supply chain to capture data from more exchanges, brokers, and trading systems on the input side, plus adding new adaptors to push normalized data to more downstream systems. We are also improving transparency and usability to provide better visibility into data flows and easier configuration so that business user/non-technical teams can operate without relying on IT. This will support faster onboarding and more resilient operations across the trade lifecycle.
Across all areas, the focus is the same: making our solutions smarter, faster, and more adaptable so clients can scale confidently without adding operational burden.
Aakash Kakkad, Senior Solutions Engineer at BroadPeak
Aakash leads product strategy and development for the Trade Surveillance solution. He brings a technical and commercial background spanning product management, sales engineering, implementation, and quality assurance. His cross-functional experience allows him to translate complex trade surveillance and compliance challenges into practical solutions.
