February 2020
Company Spotlight
NatGasHub
For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed NatGasHub Founder and CEO, Jay Bhatty, about their efforts to make the natural gas scheduling process much more efficient and secure. NatGasHub is a cloud-based, multi-pipeline natural gas nominations dashboard that aggregates pipeline data from numerous pipeline websites. For more information on NatGasHub, please visit www.natgashub.com.
Background: In October 2016, Jay Bhatty left J.P. Morgan and founded NatGasHub in an effort to provide the natural gas trading industry a more streamlined process of scheduling the physical delivery after a trade is executed. Through his 14 years of commodities trading experience, Jay saw first-hand how much redundancy and human error could be eliminated from the scheduling process. What was taking the schedulers hours to complete should only take a few minutes.
Value Proposition: After traders agree on the price, quantity, and date the natural gas is to be exchanged, it is the schedulers responsibility to coordinate with the counterparty and multiple pipelines to ensure delivery happens accurately. Before NatGasHub, this process involved keeping track of this information manually through spreadsheets and navigating numerous pipeline websites, which is very inefficient, introduces human error, and creates security risks. The following NatGasHub features enable it to significantly improve on these shortfalls:
“One-Stop Shop”: Similar to travel aggregators like Kayak and Expedia, NatGasHub eliminates the need to visit 40 to 50 different pipeline websites and forms to check if they have capacity and nominate the appropriate quantity of gas that will be exchanged. NatGasHub instead connects directly to a vast network of pipeline electronic bulletin boards (EBBs), enabling the scheduler to submit all of their nominations with one click. This not only significant cuts down the time necessary to complete this task (from hours to minutes) but also eliminates potential human error, which often results in trades not going through.
NAESB Certified: NatGasHub’s platform has been rigorously tested according to stringent NAESB cybersecurity protocols, which has led to it also being FERC compliant. While each individual pipeline EBB also complies with the same security measures, the redundant process of having to go to numerous websites to enter the same information has led to this information being stored in unsecure spreadsheets and shared through unencrypted emails. By eliminating these redundancies, NatGasHub not only makes the process more user-friendly but also addresses potential security deficiencies in the process.
Cloud-Based Dashboard: Users can access NatGasHub and submit pipeline nominations from any computer, mobile phone, or tablet with internet access (both through its website and iOS / Android apps). Further, the platform also offers several other tools that help schedulers do their job more effectively and efficiently, such as real-time mobile notifications about critical or non-critical notices as well as the ability to save and automatically submit recurring nominations.
Closing Thoughts: Already generating a profit, NatGasHub has made many schedulers’ jobs easier and is continuing to develop tools to make the gas trading process more seamless and cost-efficient as well as creating similar platforms for crude oil and refined products. We look forward to following where Jay and his team take the platform next.