To the moon with BaaS

Twice every year, GoDataDriven makes time and budget available for consultants to realize innovative ideas. We do so by inviting everyone to pitch what they believe will be the next “bright idea” — something that could create an impact. We refer to this event as Moonshot, because, more than business value, the focus is on pure innovation. After the pitch, a voting round determines who wins the financial support to go from idea to product/solution.

This round, we (Ruben, Diederik, and Giovanni) pitched BaaS, which is an acronym for Backtesting as a Service. A solution created to enable financial trading companies to validate trading strategies by using large amounts of historical data. It was a close call, but BaaS received most of the votes, which gave us the green light to start bringing our ideas to life.

Let’s take a little step back to first create a better understanding of (the need for) BaaS. The Fintech industry, and underlying trading start- and scale-ups, is a data-rich domain that has been growing exponentially, especially in the Netherlands. The IPO of Adyen is probably the most well-known example. But, it’s not all sunshine and flowers.

Backtesting, in essence, is very simple: you measure the performance of a potential new trading strategy on historical data and assume that, if it performed well in the past, it will perform similarly well in the future. Yet, many Fintech companies are struggling to work with large amounts of data and hundreds of financial instruments. This is where BaaS comes in! A solution that also enables us to showcase our expertise, namely: building scalable data-driven solutions to solve a real-life issue.

So, we had an issue to solve and an idea of how to solve it, now all we needed was a mind-blowing pitch! Ruben and Diederik further developed the concept during several ideation sessions, created a convincing story, and the rest is history!

This December, we will be fully committed to BaaS. We have found an Amsterdam-based trading company to partner with. When presenting our ideas, they instantly recognized the opportunity and were positively surprised by our ambitions. Together, we will determine the scope of the project and develop a first version of the product.

The great thing about this partnership is that it grants us access to all relevant domain knowledge and data we need to develop a solution that has the potential to solve real-world problems. Through this moonshot, we expect to gain a foothold in the Fintech domain with a unique, AI-based, scalable product.

For us, the innovative and entrepreneurial culture at GoDataDriven makes it an attractive company to work for: it is one of the main reasons we applied for a job here. The culture is something that needs to be cultivated by the people in the company, by embracing initiatives and actively participating where possible. We definitely gave our all when preparing for the pitching round and winning it was the best reward we could have wished for.

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