Simpson Spence Young Partners with Tech Firm Signal Ocean

International shipbroker Simpson Spence Young and Signal Ocean Ltd have just announced that they have entered into a strategic partnership as investors to work together to bring high-impact technology solutions to the commercial ship management of dry bulk carriers.

Simpson Spence Young (SSY) is the world's largest independent and privately owned shipbroker, with 20 offices worldwide and over 400 people serving all the major shipping and commodity locations around the globe. 

Signal Ocean is a technology start-up with a strong shipping pedigree that successfully launched The Signal Ocean Platform in 2018, offering already widely adopted decision-support solutions to chartering professionals in the larger crude-oil tanker segments. Together, the two companies will develop solutions and services to dry-bulk chartering professionals.   

Chairman of SSY, Mark Richardson, commented: "We are very excited about this new partnership, that enables us to focus on an area of shipping analytics that is fast becoming the differentiator for businesses.  As part of our technology strategy, we recognise there is a growing need for cutting edge, data-driven technology in the shipbroking world. Signal Ocean already provides best-in-class solutions to the market and we are looking forward to working together to develop further innovations." 

Commercial shipping offers a vast number of information challenges. Professionals have to constantly collect, piece together and interpret thousands of snippets of information every day to stay on-top of the global freight markets. The Signal Ocean Platform was born of a desire to improve the flow, fusion and analysis of such information to help professionals focus on achieving extraordinary performance.

Ioannis Martinos, CEO at Signal added: "Our strategic collaboration with SSY, one of the worlds largest and most forward thinking shipbrokers, puts us in a unique position to develop a deeply value adding solution for the dry market. Our ambition is to cover all dry vessel sizes, giving our users superior minute by minute situational awareness of dry market activity."

Work is scheduled to begin immediately, while the first phase will focus on deploying, testing and fine-tuning the technology internally at SSY before engaging other interested parties.