This post is part of a series exploring the Veson Platform, a new experience for IMOS that brings contextual AI, email, and validated market data together in one place. Read the rest of the series: CoCaptain AI, Connect, and Vessel Insights.
Bunker fuel typically accounts for 50 to 60 percent of vessel-running costs in a global market worth over $125 billion annually. Despite that scale, most commercial maritime teams are still managing fuel costs through a patchwork of broker quotes, market reports, and manual spreadsheets. The data is fragmented, the benchmarks are conflicting, and many of the sources teams rely on most have a direct position in the transaction. The result is a market where the risks of poor intelligence are often invisible until it is too late.
Bunker Insights is an independent bunker price benchmark, native to the Veson Platform, powered by a deep learning model trained on Veson’s proprietary dataset of real executed contracts and calibrated daily against CME crude futures.
Here’s how Bunker Insights addresses the core problems of price visibility so you can make procurement decisions based on evidence, not instinct.
How do you know if a bunker quote reflects fair value?
Most procurement teams have no straightforward way to answer that question. Broker assessments and published market reports are the most accessible reference points, but both are built on surveyed responses from active market participants with their own incentives. Without an independent benchmark, negotiations default to relationships rather than evidence, and outliers go unchallenged.
When we built Bunker Insights, our objective was to train the model on hundreds of thousands of actual, executed bunker procurement contracts from Veson’s proprietary maritime dataset. Real transactions, at real ports, across years of market activity. Because the model has no position in any trade, it provides a genuinely independent reference that procurement teams can use to validate quotes, challenge outliers, and negotiate with confidence.
The predictions are backtested daily, comparing yesterday’s estimates against real transaction prices executed in the market that day. Across HFO, LFO, and MDO, this achieves ~95% accuracy. Testing results directly feed into the confidence intervals published alongside every prediction, so teams can see exactly how the model has been performing at a given port before they use it to validate a quote or build a voyage estimate.
Want to see what Bunker Insights can do for your teams?
From today’s price to forward scenarios, across every port
Voyage estimates built on static fuel assumptions can go stale within days. Across a 60-to-90-day voyage and thousands of tonnes, even a small error is enough to turn a profitable fixture into a loss, often discovered only after the fact.
For teams managing exposure across multiple trade lanes, quantifying the risk of potential fuel costs requires hours of manual work that most teams cannot sustain, so it goes unmeasured. At secondary ports, where traditional price reporters provide limited coverage, there is often no benchmark at all.
Here’s how Bunker Insights covers the full procurement and planning cycle:
- Daily price predictions for 1,300+ ports, calibrated each day against the latest CME crude futures settlement, so voyage estimates are built on current market reality rather than assumptions that have already moved.
- Historical price data for 20 major hubs going back to 2018, giving chartering teams the context to identify seasonal patterns and anchor contract negotiations with evidence.
- Forward scenario analysis extending to approximately 9,500 ports, including secondary locations, so bunker desks can model cost curves, quantify exposure, and inform hedging strategy before it becomes a problem.
Bunker price intelligence embedded in your existing workflow
Most data tools that live outside a team’s core system get used selectively. Bunker Insights was built to avoid that. It is native to the Veson Platform, surfaced through Insights Dashboards where voyage planners and bunker desks already work. Prices, trends, and port comparisons are available alongside the voyages and estimates they inform, without switching systems or exporting data manually.
The full dataset is also available via API for teams that need to connect it to BI tools, internal risk models, or hedging platforms. For organizations already working with providers like Argus, Platts, or OPIS, Bunker Insights functions as an independent cross-reference rather than a replacement.
A stronger foundation for every bunker decision
The opportunity to make better-informed procurement and planning decisions, with data that reflects what the market actually does, is one I believe is long overdue for this industry.
With Bunker Insights, quote validation moves from gut feel to evidence, voyage estimates carry fuel assumptions that hold up over the life of the fixture, and forward exposure becomes something teams can actively manage rather than discover after the fact.
As the dataset grows and the model continues to improve, that precision extends to more ports and more market conditions. Teams that adopt Bunker Insights now will establish a foundation rooted in price intelligence and independent, validated data that only gets stronger over time.
Learn more about leveraging Bunker Insights within the Veson Platform or request a demo to get started.
