Know the margin before you commit
Commodity traders commit working capital and book trades before they truly know the landed margin, the funding cost or the FX impact. By the time the numbers are clear, the deal is already done. finPhlo's feasibility engine moves that calculation to where it belongs: before you commit.
The problem with deciding after the fact
A new opportunity arrives. A supplier has tonnage available, a customer has demand, and the headline price looks workable. The desk commits, books the purchase and lines up the sale. Only later, once logistics quotes come in, the duty rate is confirmed, the funding period is understood and the currency leg is priced, does the real margin emerge. Sometimes it is fine. Sometimes the trade that looked good on the headline price barely covers its own cost of capital.
The issue is sequencing. Most desks calculate the full economics after they have already committed, when there is nothing left to decide. The cost-of-supply build-up, the funding cost over the payment gap and the FX impact all land too late to change the answer.
The cost of committing blind
Capital and credit lines are finite. Every opportunity a desk pursues consumes headroom that another trade could have used. Committing before the margin is known means scarce funding can end up on trades that barely pay, while genuinely profitable ones go unfunded.
What finPhlo models before you commit
Enter or import an opportunity and the engine builds the full economics, then returns a clear feasibility decision. It covers the cost of supply, sourcing against demand, the FX and funding legs, and the expected margin that actually matters.
Cost of supply
Landed cost built from the ground up: purchase price, inbound and outbound logistics, insurance, duties and the cost implications of the chosen incoterms. A true cost-of-supply figure, not a headline price that hides the freight and duty that erode it.
Sourcing against demand
An opportunity is only real if both sides hold. The engine sets the supplier sourcing position against confirmed or expected customer demand, so a trade is not modelled as feasible on supply the desk cannot actually place.
FX and funding cost
Cross-currency trades carry a currency leg and a financing leg. The engine factors in the FX impact of buying and selling in different currencies and the cost of funding the gap between paying the supplier and being paid. The two costs most often left out of a back-of-envelope margin.
Expected margin and a decision
The output is an expected margin and a feasibility verdict, so the trader gets an answer rather than a spreadsheet to interpret. Feasible, needs review, or not feasible.
An answer, not a spreadsheet to interpret
The engine returns one of three verdicts, so the desk can act rather than reconcile cells:
Feasible
The expected margin clears the threshold. Worth pursuing.
Needs review
Borderline economics or missing inputs. A human decides.
Not feasible
The margin does not justify the capital. Pass.
Feasibility sits inside how a trade already moves
Feasibility is not a separate exercise bolted onto the desk. It runs on the path a trade already takes, from "is this worth doing" to "do it", with no re-keying in between.
An opportunity is captured
A trader enters it directly, or it is pushed from a deal sheet into finPhlo, with the supplier, customer, commodity, currency and expected dates.
A feasibility run is triggered
The engine builds the cost-of-supply, FX and funding picture from live data and returns an expected margin and a decision.
The trader reviews the result
Feasible, not feasible, or needs review. Borderline cases get a human judgement rather than an automatic answer.
The confirmed deal flows to opsPhlo
Once a deal is marked feasible and the customer commits, the draft sales and purchase order flows into opsPhlo for execution, with no second data-entry step.
Drawn from real practice
This workflow mirrors work with a multi-geography trading group: opportunities feasibility-tested in finPhlo, then the confirmed deals handed to opsPhlo for execution. A single path from question to action, with no re-keying in between.
Direct scarce capital at the trades that pay
Only a fraction of the opportunities that cross a desk are worth pursuing. The skill is not in working every deal, it is in choosing the ones that pay. Feasibility-first means scarce working capital and credit lines are directed at the trades that actually clear their cost of capital, not the ones that merely looked attractive on the headline price.
- See the number up front, while renegotiating the price still costs nothing.
- Change the incoterms or restructure the funding before the deal is booked.
- Walk away while walking away is free, rather than after committing capital.
- Reserve facility headroom for the deals that genuinely earn it.
The front end of the finPhlo loop
Feasibility is where the finPhlo loop starts. The back end is what happens once the trade is live: cashflow, FX exposure and the post-trade actual margin once funding and hedge-timing costs are realised. The expected margin you model at feasibility is the benchmark the actual margin is measured against, so the desk learns whether its assumptions held and prices the next deal accordingly.
See how the full loop fits together in how it works, and how the currency leg is managed once a trade is live in FX and hedging.
Test a deal before you commit a penny
We will run a feasibility walkthrough using a trade shaped like yours: real cost-of-supply build-up, FX and funding cost, ending in an expected margin and a decision.