Goldbaum recently joined the Silicon Luxembourg Business Club. Get to know the startup!
(Featured Image: Valérian Branco (sitting) and Marco Materazzi (standing right) founded GoldbAuM / Image Credit © Olivier Minaire)
What is your startup about?
This startup is about financiers and techies launching their first independent financial research technology provider out of Luxembourg. Our vision is to help finance professionals such as money managers or analysts do more and better research with fewer resources. And our mission is to fully automate error-prone and heavily-manual selection processes so they can forget about old school methods and outdated tools such as spreadsheets.
How did you come up with the idea?
Out of our own professional experience. The two of us met in London (Valérian, Marco) through work or our professional network. We spent our past careers at the largest or most sophisticated financial institutions. There, we understood well the limitations and shortcomings of current systems and processes in place. From both a research and a technology perspective, we either struggled ourselves or saw our clients struggle to make the right choices, day in day out. Regulatory landscapes and market micro-structures can change a lot over time but most of the traditional actors just stay behind the curve. This will not change in the near future and will even worsen unless the right innovation happens. We wanted to tackle these far-reaching and profound impacts, with technology and in one go. Therefore, we realized that an independent platform integrating deep analysis and fast due-diligence of financial products available at a click of a button has its value in the financial market research space. It would take a lot of pain away from our clients.
What are your products/services?
Our digital platform offers two automation services and only B2B. The first service takes over selection processes of financial products while the second one generates research content which is tailor-made to profiles (client, risk, investment, ….). For our users, it is a cost-efficient way to integrate into their investment research process precise and reliable data and deep-diving analytics powered by machine learning. Our users lift the opacity of current market structures and products with little or no effort. They will be exposed to a more-suitable, wider and unbiased choice of products. Decision making becomes a 5 minutes job – instead of hours or days. In return, they can spend more time doing deeper research all the while respecting the latest regulation and improve the quality of their own services. They will still think about “where” to invest or “what” market to recommend but our platform will help them in the “how” and “when”. Automatically, continuously, and systematically.
“We need to transform our current minimum viable product into its product version. Hence, we need to bring in more talent in dev, data, and research.”
What is your business model?
Cloud-based and lean. We run a SaaS model which our clients onboard with one of our services in exchange for a monthly subscription fee. By letting the software run these processes independently, our clients stop passing on current shortcomings directly into their research – if they have any in the first place. Our clients value such a digital model, as it means that they get access to a higher level of expertise, which understands their problems and is aware and confronted to the same market and regulatory evolutions.
Who are your clients?
Banking, financial and insurance companies which need (or want) to perform financial market research, either internally for stakeholders, or externally for end-clients or investors. It can range from a small one-person advisory boutique over to a medium-sized asset manager to a larger private bank. And it is basically anybody who has no resources to deploy vast and costly manual research processes. With us, they jump right into the future of research: independent, automated AND tailor-made.
What are the next steps in your development?
We need to transform our current minimum viable product into its product version. Hence, we need to bring in more talent in dev, data, and research. And this should come relatively soon as we are eager to deploy our research frameworks to even more products and markets.
