We recently had a chat with Jonathan Reeve, Head of Automation at Liv-ex, the global marketplace for the wine trade. Jonathan gives us a background on how Liv-ex was established, how it has grown over the last 20 years and what it is possible to achieve if you use Bevica and Liv-ex together.
What is the history behind the company, when was it established, who were the founders?
Liv-ex was founded by former stockbrokers James Miles and Justin Gibbs in the year 2000.
Their idea was to build an online stock exchange for wine, with the aim to make fine wine trading transparent, efficient and safe.
Today, Liv-ex has over 600 members from 43 countries worldwide – and growing. It is now the global marketplace for pricing, buying and selling wine, whether through our web-based trading platform, or through third-party integrations, such as Bevica.
What kind of organisations approach you?
Liv-ex serves a wide range of professional wine businesses, from traditional merchants to wine tech startups. Our members also include producers, negociants, importers, warehouses, and wine information providers. Many of these use Microsoft as their default systems provider.
What common critical business challenges do people mention during conversations with you?
The first business challenge many mention is list management – specifically acquiring accurate valuation data for their stock – both physical and virtual stock. Liv-ex has long been the industry standard for wine data, so is the first port of call for businesses seeking wine data.
Another challenge that frequently comes up during conversations is efficient stock/inventory management; raising purchase orders, updating stock lists, customer invoicing and stock replenishment. Each of these can be smoothly achieved through the coupling of Bevica and the Liv-ex marketplace. Lastly, achieving connectivity between their systems and wine market data can be difficult. The cost and time of engineering API integrations is a significant – sometimes prohibitive – challenge for some of our customers. Bevica provides these customers with purpose-built software and digital services.
What is your working relationship like with any of your Bevica users? What does the future look like?
Some of Liv-ex’s longest-standing and most valued customers use Bevica. All these customers, by integrating with Bevica, have already begun their journey towards automated trading and the acquisition of wine market data. The future of this journey will include these customers using more and more Liv-ex data and services through Bevica.
What is possible to achieve using Liv-ex and Bevica together?
Using Liv-ex in combination with Bevica makes it possible to automate trading, data acquisition and logistics processes. For example, merchants can offer their stock on Liv-ex automatically from the Bevica ERP, pull into their internal system data from the global wine marketplace – and eliminate administrative, manual and time-consuming tasks related to logistics and payments. Together, Liv-ex and Bevica are helping wine businesses around the world to trade more efficiently.
If someone is interested in working with you, what should they do next?
If you are a professional wine business, you get in touch with Liv-ex here, and one of our teams will reach out to understand how we can best support your business needs. You can also book a demo with us, and we will show you how Liv-ex works.
