Former Argus, Platts executives start new oil reporting agency.

Petrotahlil - Two former senior executives at global oil and commodity pricing agencies S&P Platts and Argus Media have started a new reporting firm catering for traders and the wider energy industry.

Neil Bradford, the former chief executive at Argus Media, and Jorge Montepeque, formerly at Italian oil firm Eni and the director of market reporting at Platts, set up the company at the start of this year.

The new agency, called General Index, will intensively use financial technology to provide market data in order to keep costs low, mainly by holding down headcount.

Platts and Argus have teams of reporters who speak to traders across commodity markets on a daily basis in order to set prices. In oil, Platts sets the key dated Brent benchmark used to trade more than half of the world’s physical crude.

“It is hard to envision the current state of benchmark generation and publishing remaining in the same antiquated form for the next 10 years,” Jorge Montepeque told Reuters. “Systems always move on and we are planning to be the future.”

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