A celebration of evolution: one year later

It’s safe to say it has been a very busy year so we’re celebrating!

What did our rebrand mean to you?

But first, a quick history:

Over 130 years ago, our founders saw a visible gap in the metals industry – a source for reliable pricing and market information. Pricing transparency and market insight was scarce. So William I. Russell began to investigate and publish transparent prices and market information across varied metals types under the title American Metal Market (AMM); and there our story begins.

Soon after, Lawrence Howard Quin, having identified the need for deeper base metals coverage, launched Metal Bulletin (MB), providing prices and market coverage to the global markets. Copper, tin, lead and zinc were the backbone of the coverage as well as tinplate, galvanized steel, pig iron, and semis and scrap, plus more specialist materials such as tungsten. Through the decades, AMM and MB continued to develop the pricing and coverage needed for their regional metals markets, both growing successfully and becoming renowned experts in the metals markets they served.

Just as our founders intended, we remain committed to providing our customers with transparency in specialist commodity markets with the aim to be the world’s leading and most trusted commodities data provider. Not only that but over the past century we have evolved with the constantly changing markets we cover while identifying gaps in new markets, dedicated to staying ahead of our competitors and vigorously worked to improve and expand our offerings for you – our valued customer.

We’ve been able to continue this endeavour following the acquisition from our parent company, Euromoney Institutional Investor, in 2006, which helped us achieve this through several different channels:

• In people: Across all brands there are around 160 price reporters, editors and analysts working for the company. Working alongside them are dedicated compliance, technology, marketing, product, sales and newsdesk teams.
• In processes: We engaged an independent auditor to ensure that our pricing processes represent the stated methodology in line with the IOSCO guidelines. Along with this, we have completed external assurance reviews of benchmark prices.
• In technology: We have developed proprietary software known as MInD (the Markets Information Database), which is an auditable and user-friendly database that reporters and editors use to capture all relevant information on the prices that the company assesses and the indices it calculates.

Fast-forward to the present day. It’s an exciting time for our customers. Over the past year we have continually developed our products and services to make them more advanced, integrated and reliable. With this, we aim to solve customer problems by meeting their needs and propelling their business forward in this complex, risky and fast-paced market.

We’re looking back on our first year as Fastmarkets and we want to hear from you. By giving us your feedback, you’ll be helping us:

• Understand if we communicated the rebrand effectively and efficiently;
• Learn how we are perceived in the market; and
• Equip ourselves with the knowledge needed to ensure a smooth transition to becoming the world’s leading price reporting agency.

To help us gather this feedback, we have put together a survey – it only takes a few minutes to complete and is invaluable in helping us understand what our rebrand means to you.

We thank you for being part of Fastmarkets’ journey so far and look forward to building a better future with you.