On a recent cycle ride, a fellow cyclist asked me what FINBOURNE does. Before I could reply a friend interjected with “FINBOURNE is building a ‘Strava’ for investment data”.
I love Strava, and while the analogy is a bit tenuous, I loved his comparison.
For those who aren’t familiar with Strava (or other similar apps like MapMyRun and Endomondo), it’s a fitness app that records your running / cycling / swimming data based on GPS co-ordinates. As you’re about to set off, you just tell it what you’re doing (cycling in my case), hit record on your device and it does the rest – it knows your location, movement, speed, can show it on a map etc. If you’re wearing a watch or device that senses your heart rate you can tell Strava to pull that data in too.
Every activity you log is recorded on Strava indefinitely. You can go back in time and view any past event. The raw data is extremely granular and can therefore be served up for many different purposes via Strava’s APIs. You control your own data, can download it, or can leave it there and purchase additional services from Strava or others. As more and more people decide to host their fitness data on Strava, it has become the default ‘utility’ platform for the market. As a result, thousands of third-party apps have started offering services into Strava, from commuter leader boards, to insurance companies (mine offers reductions if I let them see my Strava data – I don’t but the option is there), and providers of advanced performance analytics.
Strava raised the bar for the fitness industry and became a common backbone for the market so that regular people like me could access the type of analysis previously available only to professionals. The cost of integrating my data to the specialist functionality is gone. Everyone aligns with one common set of APIs.
If you are involved with the investment management industry, you’ll be familiar with the nightmare people have because our data sits in so many different systems.
Imagine if we had a Strava.
That’s what the cyclist was saying… LUSID, which is FINBOURNE’s core product, is an open data platform that allows investors to host investment data at a very granular level.
We work tirelessly on the deep-down technology to make the platform work (like how does the API for ‘Amend a trade’ or ‘create a portfolio’ work.. or what happens if the CPU clock on a processor gives up while a transaction is being committed to the event register).
Just as I don’t want to worry about how Strava deals with GPS co-ordinates in areas of weak reception, you don’t want to worry about underlying technology if your job is to manage an investment portfolio.
We want to speak to you if you want to join us on our journey – as a prospective client or employee. Please contact us on info@finbourne.com
ment industry need a fitness app?
