What Energy Trading Firms Are Teaching Us About Interoperability

Energy Trading Week Europe 2026 brought more than 2,500 traders, analysts, and technologists to London, with one theme surfacing repeatedly across our conversations: connecting technology is often easier than connecting the organisations behind it.

This was interop.io’s first time at the event. Across a panel on system silos and an Axpo case study on building a connected trader cockpit, the discussion moved beyond integration architecture to data trust, organisational structure, and the way traders and technology teams work together.

Here are the ideas that stood out.

Silos are an organisational problem wearing a technology costume

The panel, “Breaking the system silos: Tackling interoperability for fast execution and scalability”, brought together Chris Coleman, Sales Director at interop.io, alongside Simon Niven, a commodities CIO, and Sameer Soleja, President of Molecule Software, with Piyush Nema of Centrica moderating.

The central argument that emerged was not really about technology. Technical architecture tends to mirror organisational structure: separate budgets, separate teams, separate data ownership. As a result, many of the silos that slow firms down are organisational in origin.

Chris noted that firms typically organise by commodity and value chain segment, leaving unmanaged edges between teams where some of the most persistent friction accumulates.

On AI, a clear message emerged from the panel: AI can amplify existing data quality problems rather than solve them. Governance and trust have to come first.

The advice from all three panelists converged on a similar approach. Map the end-to-end business flow, identify where the friction actually lives, and solve one high-value problem before moving to the next. Translation layers are here to stay, and the firms that do this well start focused and expand from there.

The trader shouldn’t have to be the integration layer

Chris joined Joel Fringeli, Senior IT Product Owner at Axpo, and Simon Näf, IM Solutions Engineer at Axpo, for a case study on the Trader Cockpit Axpo built on the interop.io platform, how it was designed and deployed, and what running it has taught the team.

The starting point was a straightforward problem. Traders were running multiple applications simultaneously, effectively acting as the integration layer themselves: copy-pasting data, switching context, and bridging systems that were never designed to talk to each other.

The cockpit replaced that with shared context. A click in one application can immediately update the context across others, without the trader having to carry that information manually.

What the team did not expect was how much the working relationship mattered. Engineers moved onto the trading floor, worked alongside traders, and iterated in real time.

Joel described that proximity, and the trust it built, as being at least as important as the platform itself. The cockpit did not just change how applications connect; it changed how the people using them work together.

The takeaway: The technology is ready. The harder question is whether your organisation is.

Both sessions pointed to the same conclusion: the tools to connect fragmented environments exist. The harder question is whether firms are structured to let them work.

Axpo’s cockpit offered one practical answer: start with a clearly defined problem, build around the people doing the work, and expand only when there is a reason to. The panel reached the same point from a different direction. Technology can bridge systems, but lasting interoperability also requires shared ownership, trusted data, and alignment across teams.