Energy traders get ‘serious’ about instant messaging as Yahoo closes doors

Jamie Stewart

12-Aug-2016

Most energy traders have been dragged away from Yahoo Messenger for good this week, the instant communication tool that has dominated across the industry for years.

The process has been relatively smooth, with the only common complaint being that the newly-emerged dominant platforms, Eikon Messenger and ICE Instant Messaging, lack the informality and wide-ranging emoticons of their soon-to-be-defunct former rival.

“It’s too serious [compared to Yahoo],” one European energy trader said of the newly-emerged platforms. “But apart from that, they work.”

Transition

As an ICIS survey indicated in the weeks leading up to the staggered closure of Yahoo (see ESGM and EDEM 29 June 2016), Eikon Messenger has emerged from the pack as the dominant communication tool for European power and gas traders, while the global crude and LNG industry has adopted ICE Instant Messaging.

While technically still available, some support functions covering Yahoo Messenger’s legacy desktop application ceased as of Friday 5 August, and the tool is scheduled to close completely as of 31 August.

By all accounts, the energy trading industry’s transition has been for the most part smooth, and indeed in many cases was not even a transition, because companies were already set up and actively chatting with counterparties on either Eikon, ICE or both platforms.

The only hiccup – lack of sufficient emoticons aside – has been the transfer of contacts between platforms and some administrative issues related to registration.

“Our switch [to Eikon] was quite smooth,” one trader at a major European utility said. “We had some trouble exporting all the contacts from Yahoo to Eikon but otherwise no big problems. A lot of counterparties were already there.”

Reluctant

Other traders were less willing to part with their familiar chat tool, however. “I have not installed [the new platforms] yet. “But if I am forced to, well… I will,” one reluctant European trader said.

Outside of Europe, where ICE Instant Messaging has become the Yahoo replacement of choice in most cases, the picture is slightly different because other platforms, which have no plans to close, have already been used for years alongside Yahoo.

In Asia, for example, as one ICIS colleague explained, many traders use WhatsApp, “and have been for ages – some just on phones and some on desktops … the drop in yahoo has not made a huge change for Asian LNG.”

While in the crude world, the transition to ICE also appears to have been carried out with the minimum of pain.

Going forwards, the energy trading industry as a whole, including market reporters, may be forced to adapt communication methods to be less reliant on indicative facial expressions, because neither Eikon Messenger nor ICE Instant Messaging have announced plans to expand their range of emoticons to meet the industry’s needs:

“They want it to look like a tool for professionals,” one European trader commented, before agreeing that professionals have feelings too. “Well, some of them,” he added. jamie.stewart@icis.com

ICIS market reporters’ view

Alongside the rest of the energy trading sector, ICIS journalists have for years been regular users of Yahoo Messenger as a key means of staying in touch with the markets they report on every day. Here are the thoughts of a handful of market reporters on a – mostly – painless transition:

• “The contacts I use via Yahoo are also registered on Eikon and are running both simultaneously. The transition has been painless as a result from the perspective of information exchange”

• “Setting up Eikon was an arduous process. I was sent an email saying there is already a [person with the same name as me] subscribed at a different company and I had to go through a drawn out verification process to establish we are two different people. My name is common – but I’m the only one in ICIS so the only one to be signing up with an @icis.com address so this seemed rather silly”

• “Eikon has been easy to use and add Yahoo contacts to. It has a decent layout for looking at historical messages”

• “I don’t like the interface of either system [Eikon or ICE]. It’s too dark, and I fear the tab systems are an accident waiting to happen: typing things in the wrong chat? Oh dear”

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