Text messaging can move markets.

Text messaging is an interesting technology – and it has the ability to disrupt or change industries. Consider the London Metal Exchange (LME). This is an inventory based global exchange with over 500 licensed warehouses around the globe. These warehouses receive, store and deliver base metals such as copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, tin and nickel. The warehouses report inventory updates one time per day. This means that new trades, cancelled contracts and deliveries taken woefully lack the real-time nature of commodity trading.

Physical inventories take time, but it’s clear that in the current world of Amazon, same-day deliveries, robotics, QR codes and other mobile technologies it’s very possible to provide triggered alerts on the exit and entry of physical goods in all LME warehouses around the world. Conceptually speaking, any trader worldwide could subscribe via a mobile device into a centralized service that aggregates the real-time updates of physical commodities (those entering and exiting the 500+ warehouses) and automatically return a text message with current availability of all base metals – globally. Among other things, the text message report could be personalized to each individual trader and encoded in a QR Code. Seems reasonable if you ask me... #LME #innovation #digitalmarketing #smsautomation