Geopolitical upheaval is redrawing global trading patterns, with significant implications for commodity markets. Icap, Energy Risk’s 2025 Commodity broker of the year, has responded to this with a bold new structure that strengthens leadership in regional centres, but also increases connections between regions.
As co-heads of energy and commodities at Icap’s parent firm TP Icap, David Silbert, chief executive (CEO) Americas, and Joachim Emanuelsson, CEO Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea), have been working since July 2024 on the handover with Andrew Polydor, former CEO, now chair, energy and commodities.
“We came in last summer with a mandate to really go for it,” says Emanuelsson. The three main centres – Emea, the Americas and Asia-Pacific – are connected by the joint management team, enabling Icap to offer a “truly global” service, Silbert says.
Joachim Emanuelsson
In recent months, Icap has improved internal processes so desks spanning different commodities, regions and time zones can work together more effectively. It has also hired new brokers across its energy, physical commodities and agricultural desks throughout the three regions.
Strengthening its presence in physical markets has been a key move for the firm over the past year, especially as hedge funds, banks and other financial players have become more active in physical markets, such as gas and power. “We are highly focused on financial, over-the-counter transactions and futures, but our brands, including PVM, also allow us to be much more involved in physical markets in a meaningful way,” Silbert says. “We’ll be focusing even more on physical markets, whether in energy or agriculture,” he adds.
Environmental markets are also a big play for the brokerage. Icap has long played a key role in environmental markets, being active in the European Union’s emissions trading scheme from its early days. Now it is active in compliance markets the world over as well as offering clients access to voluntary carbon markets. The firm has a growing weather business and also works with clients in energy transition markets, such as liquified natural gas.
“We are continuing to build momentum in environmental markets,” Silbert says.
In January 2025, Icap launched a Copenhagen-based dry bulk commodities desk to broker physical ferrous and non-ferrous metals. This will allow its clients involved in renewable energy infrastructure development to hedge price exposure using financially settled contracts for essential energy transition materials such as iron ore.
Being part of the TP Icap group – which includes other energy brands such as Tullett Prebon, PVM, Liquidnet and Parameta Solutions – Icap benefits from, and contributes to, wider projects that span the entire group. For example, the TP Icap group announced a new partnership with Amazon Web Services in December 2024 in which the two companies will collaborate to scale Fusion, the brokerage group’s cloud-based multi-asset class trading platform. The company will also work with AWS on sustainability-focused trading solutions for corporates. These clients represent a new segment for the brokerage.
“The AWS deal is interesting because it connects us with a different set of clients that we don’t necessarily have as wholesale brokers,” Emanuelsson says. However, he stresses that the brokerage has the ideal experience to cater to them. “We’re in the energy transition game already, we touch a lot of the commodities that are key to making the economy low carbon, as well as having global coverage of different types of carbon credits.”
These corporate clients want to understand how to achieve net zero and require support to execute the resulting decarbonisation strategies, he says.
And while there is now more uncertainty over environmental legislation under the new US administration, Emanuelsson is confident that becoming low carbon remains a priority at many corporations. “We’ve all read the headlines about how the US administration may slow [the energy transition] down, but we firmly believe that the train has left the station [on net zero] – corporates are still preparing for it, even if it may be a little delayed.”
And when it comes to Fusion, Silbert adds that AWS’s expertise and resources in data storage and artificial intelligence, will not only help to enhance how the brokerage stores and delivers data, but also how it uses AI to parse that data and deliver trading ideas and liquidity to clients.
“AWS is helping us think through how we can evolve our platforms in a more meaningful way to keep up with the ever-changing technological landscape,” Silbert says. “So, if anything, we will become smarter and more evolved by working with them – not only on carbon, but in general.”