Consultancy Firm of the Year: Baringa Partners
Baringa Partners is the winner of Energy Risk’s Consultancy Firm of the Year award for its strong performance and growth in 2011
It worked on a number of key projects, expanded into Germany through the purchase of The Executive Partners Group, restructured to create its energy advisory services team, and merged with energy specialist consultancy Redpoint Energy.
The company grew by 37% to 250 people over the past year due to expansion of its UK base and the opening of an office in Germany, the result of the incorporation of The Executive Partners Group, led by Maik Neubauer, a former board member and chief operating officer of the European Energy Exchange and chief risk officer of European Commodity Clearing.
The past 12 months have also seen the creation of the firm’s energy advisory services (EAS) practice headed by energy consultancy veteran Jayesh Parmar. The EAS practice, which encompasses the European energy policy expertise of Redpoint Energy, offers analysis and advice alongside transformation and performance improvement services with an end-to-end policy, regulation, strategy and delivery capability. This allows companies to not only react to change in European energy markets, but also helps them to have input in shaping the markets themselves.
Against a backdrop of tighter budgets and stricter financial regulation, many of Baringa’s projects over the past year have involved assisting companies to optimise the efficiency of their energy trading operations while also reducing the costs of implementing new systems. “It feels like quite a different market to two or three years ago,” says Dan Look, head of wholesale energy. “Three years ago there were lots of big programmes where everything was centred on growth and people wanted to know how to expand their reach and increase trading revenues. What we’ve seen in the past 12 months or so, particularly post-Fukushima, is a lot more pressure on costs,” he notes. “Our major focus currently is helping ensure businesses and systems are fully integrated in order to optimise trading transparency and trading effectiveness and costs while continuing to maximise the revenue benefits that organisations set out to achieve,” he says.
Another important part of Baringa’s work has been its involvement with market reforms taking place in the German and UK gas and power markets. The firm has conducted policy advisory work for government agencies and system providers, as well as consultation to companies needing to adapt to such reforms.
Through our consulting side we’re very closely associated with the design of the energy markets
As energy market liberalisation pushes further across Europe, Baringa Partners has been advising companies looking to move into the region. “We helped one of our clients that was looking to significantly expand its trading activities in eastern Europe, to identify and analyse the opportunity, understand the scale of the investment required to build up their trading capability, and how that would be delivered. That has been done in the context of a market that is growing quite substantially,” says Parmar.
Parmar credits the success of Baringa to a combination of inside experience and outstanding delivery – spanning the services from strategy, consulting and ETRM systems advisory.
Its clients agree. “Baringa has a number of different qualities that set it apart from some of the other partners and consultancies we use. They are proactive and flexible, help to shape projects where it is uncertain what the outcome might be, and they work with some of our projects guys very easily and flexibly,” said EDF Trading in a testimonial. “Baringa provides the glue that brings all of the partners together for us.”
Baringa Partners plans to continue expanding into central and eastern Europe and aiding with western European market reform. “Through our consulting side we’re now working with many of the regulators and policy developers in the energy markets, so we’re very closely associated with the design of those markets,” says Parmar. “We also work with the market participants in terms of helping them align their operations, develop their strategies, and then tune the delivery of energy trading and risk management solutions to be able to help them realise those opportunities.”
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