Truckstop.com, the largest digital freight marketplace in North America, and FreightWaves, the leading provider of data and analysis to the logistics markets, have partnered to provide spot trucking rate market visibility to SONAR subscribers.
Craig Fuller speaks with Brent Hutto about SONAR partnership, Trucking marketplace.
Effective immediately, FreightWaves SONAR clients will have access to Truckstop.com rate assessments in 100 of the largest truckload lanes. SONAR users will be able to access historical rates in the top 100 origin-destination pairs and will be able to benchmark, analyze and monitor key lane pairs and market activity based on Truckstop.com’s proprietary spot market assessments. Dry van, flatbed, and reefer trucking rates are included in the dataset.
SONAR users gain a powerful new dataset in Truckstop.com trucking spot rate data. The indexed lane pairs are based on billions of dollars in trucking spot transactions. When overlaid with SONAR’s tender data, which represents an estimated 85% of the electronic tenders in the market and operational data representing 240 medium and large truckload fleets, SONAR users can monitor and analyze how contract markets are impacting the truckload spot market and vice versa.
“By tracking routing guide waterfalls (monitoring how carriers respond to tender requests from shippers), we are able to offer freight brokers the most up-to-date pricing and capacity forecasts in the market,” said Craig Fuller, founder and CEO of FreightWaves. “Compliance with shipper routing guides ultimately controls who has pricing power in the market. This partnership with Truckstop.com will give SONAR customers more prescriptive pricing in the trucking spot market.”
Truckstop.com is rapidly moving towards becoming a market exchange, like NASDAQ, where brokers match pricing and orders and transactions are electronically cleared. The company’s recent announcements with Schneider (NYSE:SNDR) and Knight-Swift (NYSE: KNX) to integrate Book It Now allow brokers to automatically fulfill capacity selection in the market without requiring manual processes and back and forth negotiation.
“The level of reporting and authenticity at FreightWaves makes it an invaluable resource to anyone looking to better understand the market,” said Brent Hutto, Chief Relationship Officer, Truckstop.com. “The ability to provide relevant data to business owners is becoming more and more important, which is why we are so excited to be adding our data to SONAR.”
“Financial markets evolved in the late ’90s from voice brokerages to electronic marketplaces,” explained Fuller. “Logistics is starting to evolve in a similar way with computers matching trucks with loads that are fulfilled and cleared by systems rather than humans. Truckstop.com is well-positioned to empower freight brokerages to make the transition towards electronically matched and cleared loads.”
Meanwhile, FreightWaves is rapidly becoming a part of the freight matching ecosystem, but in a different way. FreightWaves provides trustworthy, near-term data that is essential for benchmarking, analysis, monitoring and forecasting.
In financial markets, Bloomberg provides similar data. Like Bloomberg, FreightWaves is not an exchange, but a platform that enables brokers to have visibility into the marketplace that is unavailable anywhere else.
FreightWaves SONAR offers the world’s fastest freight market data, aggregating over 150,000 different indexes from all modes of freight movement, allowing freight brokerages to have an unprecedented view of the entire logistics market.
“In a world where declining margins are becoming the norm, freight brokers are going to have to find ways to automate workflow around ‘vanilla’ and non-specialized freight,” Fuller said. “Freight matching will also become a bit like ‘Hunger Games,’ with the fastest and most agile winning the load opportunities over companies that have not automated.”
Marketplaces, empowered with fast data and market insights, will become more critical.
“The days of freight brokerages making money from an opaque market are over,” Fuller continued. “The brokerages that survive will have developed automated price and capacity discovery, participate in automated marketplaces, and make their money in differentiated services that place a premium on human intelligence and exception management. This is going to feel very similar to what financial brokerages went through in the mid-2000s.”
This partnership brings two of the most innovative freight tech providers together to offer clients with an unprecedented view of activity in the freight market. Over time, Truckstop.com and FreightWaves expect to partner on much bigger initiatives to serve the freight market.
Truckstop.com spot market rates can be found on SONAR using the following tickers:
TSTOPFR – Truckstop.com 7-Day Flatbed All-in Rate
TSTOPFV – Truckstop.com 7-Day Flatbed Volume Index
TSTOPRR – Truckstop.com 7-Day Reefer All-in Rate
TSTOPRV – Truckstop.com 7-Day Reefer Volume Index
TSTOPVR – Truckstop.com 7-Day Van All-in Rate
TSTOPVV – Truckstop.com 7-Day Van Volume Index