The Drinks Business: LiveTrade 2.0

Richard Woodard, Fine Wine Editor at The Drinks Business wrote about our recent LiveTrade updates.

Tried and trusted as it may be, the traditional method of trading wines on the secondary market – via merchants and brokers – comes with inherent limitations. “The majority of people sell to the company that they store their wines with,” says Matthew O’Connell, CEO of Bordeaux Index’s Livetrade platform. “And, if they sell elsewhere, they are normally asked to move the wine before it can be listed for sale.”

LiveTrade aims to cut through the restrictions of that narrow and outdated trading model. Rather than selling on a smaller scale – say via a UK merchant to its core audience of UK collectors – the now expanded platform opens up wine trading to a global B2B and B2C audience.

The model will be familiar to those who have already used the original LiveTrade platform. That spanned about 1,000 wines from Bordeaux, Champagne and Tuscany, with Bordeaux Index injecting liquidity by ‘making the market’, and showing buy and sell pricing on each and every wine, 24/7.

Crucially, this was a ‘pan-market’ platform, open to everyone, everywhere – from producers to wholesalers and retail merchants, as well as private collectors and investors large and small. Nor did the wines have to be stored with Bordeaux Index; as long as they were in bond and in pristine condition, they could be located at any warehouse in the UK and across Europe.

The success of the venture – O’Connell reckons it lists up to about 40% of the total stock of Bordeaux in the UK marketplace, with total transactions topping US$100 million a year – made its expansion a no-brainer for the company.

“The new LiveTrade is ultimately a completely new platform,” explains O’Connell. “It builds on the lessons and feedback from the old platform, and in technical terms it’s built for today’s world. Now almost any wine and most whiskies can be offered, either stored with Bordeaux Index or stored externally, as long as the stock is pristine and held in bond. There are just a few exceptions – for instance, very old and rare wines that would require inspection before being offered.”

Read the full article at The Drinks Business