Founded in 2021 by Vincent Grandjean and Allan Horgan, Propellant.digital is a fintech firm whose goal is to make financial data more accessible. Its eponymous platform stands out because it enables customers to analyse public and proprietary data to gain advanced insights. As a turnkey analytical solution with both open and cloud-native customizable dashboards, the platform does not require any involvement from the customer in terms of rollout, maintenance or configuration. It is able to offer companies a real competitive advantage by providing them with direct access to analyses, thus giving them a better overview of financial market dynamics.
55 Sources
over 10,000 CSV files processed every day
over 60,000,000 transactions per year
Financial challenges costing billions
“It’s important to understand that we operate in a sector with enormous challenges,” says Vincent Grandjean, Co-founder and CEO of Propellant.digital. “If a company doesn’t have the right information at the right time or relies on incorrect information, it runs the risk of losing millions or even billions of euro.”
According to Vincent Grandjean, fixed-income markets, which are a key target area for the platform and renowned for their lack of transparency, are almost impossible to analyze. “Data from suppliers is expensive and only provides a restricted view of the market, while public data, such as data issued by the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), tends to be dispersed, disorganized, and in multiple formats,” he explains.”Our systems enable customers to organize data collection, cleanup, or even harmonization, and comparing public data with their data, our platform can adapt to the needs of companies of all sizes and help them take control of their investments.” Propellant.digital is an SaaS solution, making it quick and easy to get up and running at a significantly lower cost than a solution that requires internal rollout.
Before founding Propellant.digital, Vincent Grandjean was Executive Director, Fixed Income eCommerce Product Manager at Santander Global Corporate Banking. As part of this role, he was involved in a comparative study of cloud-computing offers for Project Sentinel, a community platform working to simplify implementation of the MiFID II regulation for banks. Google Cloud was the chosen solution. “Unlike its competitors, Google Cloud proved to be extremely receptive to our project, even helping us to design the community platform,” he says. “Based on this experience, we didn’t hesitate when it came to choosing a supplier for Propellant.digital. It had to be Google Cloud.”
Quarterly Corporate Bond Volumes by Currency
Rising to the challenge: security in a sensitive and highly regulated industry
“Quite simply, the cloud was a must,” adds the CEO of Propellant.digital. “We needed flexibility and the option of scalability, just like any startup looking to grow, but we also needed the resources and the performance to process huge volumes of data. In addition, the cloud gave us more economic flexibility—we didn’t need to invest heavily in infrastructure before we’d even started selling.”
Operating in a highly regulated industry, Propellant.digital also needed a reliable infrastructure at the cutting edge of technology, equipped with the highest levels of security and in line with the strict requirements of the financial sector in order to protect its platform, but also reassure its customers. Covering the majority of finance-specific regulations (such as PCI DSS, PSAN, etc.), Google Cloud also offers extremely high security and compliance standards, be it ISO 27001 or even GDPR. “From both a security point of view, and in terms of support and compliance, we were fully confident,” says Vincent Grandjean.
Incorporating heterogeneous flows in real time from a multitude of sources
Despite great strides in recent years in data processing and even artificial intelligence, Vincent Grandjean is convinced that aggregating and organizing data to make it workable for end users remains a real challenge. “We’re offering a market analysis solution,” he says. “But within the analysis process, 80% of that is assembly, cleanup, or even normalization of the data to make it workable. The remaining 20% is the actual analysis—or the fun part—when we need to rely on the right tools. In terms of both dashboard design and aggregation, the Google Cloud platform’s reputation in the field of analytics is second to none. It was a considerable help to us in our approach.”
In fact, the power of the Propellant.digital solution lies in its ability to integrate data from a multitude of heterogeneous flows. “We’re not data vendors,” explains Vincent Grandjean. “For each customer, our system enables them to analyse the data they need on the fly. But the data isn’t shared: for each customer, our system enables them to connect directly to the data source. This is the strength of our solution from a business point of view. From a technical standpoint, we are extremely demanding when it comes to performance, and the tool’s strength here is its ability to process high volumes of data in real time.”
Best execution analysis
Rapid installation and smooth operation thanks to managed services
At this stage, Propellant.digital is connected to 55 sources. All data is centralized in BigQuery and updated every five minutes, before being sent to customer dashboards with the help of Looker Studio. On average, the platform ingests more than 10,000 CSV files per day with the help of managed data processing services in BigQuery. Streaming to customers is handled via Pub/Sub. Any auxiliary processing is carried out with Cloud Functions, a fully managed serverless solution. “That’s another advantage of Google Cloud: a wealth of features with multiple managed services. Consequently, development is quicker. It’s more about assembling services than the development itself, and we can focus our resources on the job rather than the provision or upkeep of infrastructures,” says Vincent Grandjean. In summary, “We had the business expertise, what we were missing was a technical partner able to rise to the challenge and deliver the performance, reliability and security we needed to simplify the implementation and operation of our platform. Google Cloud proved it was the perfect partner, helping us turn our vision into reality by supporting us every step of the way.”