Financial Services
AI Agents
LLMOps
Brand New Day
Brand New Day is a Dutch online pension bank specializing in long-term investments and savings products, helping individuals design and manage their retirement journey.
Industry:
Financial Services
Use Case:
Customer-facing AI agent
Employees
250+
Location
The Netherlands
Key outcomes
Impact at a glance
Company Overview
Brand New Day is a Dutch online pension bank on a mission to make long-term savings and retirement planning accessible to everyday people. The challenge is familiar to anyone in financial services: pensions are complex, and most customers only engage with their account once a year - usually in a panic as fiscal deadlines approach. Brand New Day sees AI as the key to changing that, helping customers navigate their pension journey with far less friction and far more confidence.
Challenges
Building an AI team from scratch without the luxury of a large engineering organization
When Niels joined Brand New Day as AI Lead, his mandate was clear: introduce AI across the company, fast - both in customer-facing products and internal operations. He had done this before, at a previous company, with a team of nearly 20 engineers. This time, he had a handful of people and ambitious timelines.
The lesson from his previous role was hard-earned. That team had built their entire LLM stack in-house - right down to hosting the models themselves. The engineering cost was enormous. Keeping up with a rapidly evolving field required constant investment in infrastructure, monitoring, logging, and governance tooling. And crucially, the process of collaborating with domain experts on prompt development was slow and error-prone, creating bottlenecks that were difficult to manage.
At Brand New Day, Niels reframed the challenge: is the AI control layer a strategic differentiator, or an enabling capability? By selecting a platform to handle the foundation, his team could focus fully on building impactful business solutions.
Niels van der Heijden
AI Lead
It was really important for me to get to impact and value as quickly as possible. We needed all the help we could get to not have to focus on the plumbing work - but really focus on bringing AI use cases to production and actually being used.
Solution
Choosing a platform designed for the full AI development lifecycle
Niels had first encountered Orq.ai at his previous company, when Orq.ai's founder came to pitch. At that point, he was heads-down building in-house and was skeptical. But he kept watching.
Over time, as the platform matured, what stood out was that Orq.ai had clearly been built with a deep understanding of how LLM-based products are actually developed. Domain expert collaboration was a central feature, not an afterthought. LLMOps - logging, monitoring, governance - was built in from the start. And critically, it covered the entire lifecycle from experimentation to production in a single, coherent platform. As Niels put it, that combination was what made him trust Orq.ai was the right provider to build on.
When Niels started his new role and began evaluating options again, Orq.ai was the clear fit. The question was no longer whether to use a platform - it was which one understood the problem well enough.
From proof of concept to production-ready agents
Brand New Day's team started with simpler use cases: document processing and classification problems, validating that Orq.ai would actually work for their context. It did. From there, they moved to what was always the real goal: building a customer-facing AI agent to complement their service offering - helping pension customers navigate their accounts, understand their options, and get immediate assistance 24/7 alongside Brand New Day's existing customer support.
The team was among the first to work with Orq.ai's agent APIs, which were in early beta at the time. That could have been a friction point, but it turned into something better. "The really nice thing I've appreciated about this whole process is that it actually did feel like co-development. On a weekly basis we could provide input, think together about our needs, and then saw really quick iterations with improvements - building towards a stable end product," says Niels.
Even engineers on the team who were initially skeptical - convinced they could build it better themselves - came around. The sticking point for most developers is the gap between a working notebook prototype and a deployed, integrated API. Orq.ai bridged that gap. As Niels put it, his engineers came back to him and said: "I did not expect it would make it this easy."
Niels van der Heijden
AI Lead
Where Orq.ai really stands out to me is how comprehensive it is. It truly covers the entire process from A to Z. Many solutions address parts of the AI development lifecycle, but Orq.ai brings everything together in one place without the usual integration pains. That’s something I genuinely haven’t seen elsewhere in the market.
Conclusion
Results & impact
The impact on Brand New Day's delivery speed has been decisive. Without Orq.ai, Niels estimates the timeline for their first agents would have been at least double - and that's before accounting for the fact that they would have needed different engineering profiles on the team to handle infrastructure, cloud, and DevOps work separately from AI development.
With Orq.ai, a small AI-focused team handled the full development cycle. The customer-facing agent reached the final stages of production release, built entirely on the platform. The team avoided the overhead of designing and maintaining their own LLM infrastructure, and gained a persistent window into how their solutions are performing - in experimentation, and in production.
As Niels described when asked what he'd miss most if Orq.ai disappeared: "Insight into how we're doing - whether that's in the experimentation phase or once the AI use case is live. The overhead from trying to understand how it's actually performing once released in the wild. That's a kind of headache I can miss very happily."
What’s Next?
What's next
Brand New Day is just getting started. Niels sees AI agents taking on a growing share of the complexity their customers face - helping them understand pension rules, calculate contribution limits, and make decisions with confidence rather than confusion. The focus isn't on the number of agents, but on the number of business problems that become practical to solve.
As the agent portfolio scales, Niels sees Orq.ai's governance and cost-tracking features becoming increasingly important - giving the team and the business visibility into what each AI solution is delivering. For a company where trust and transparency matter, that kind of accountability isn't optional. It's what makes scaling AI responsibly possible.
Niels van der Heijden
AI Lead
I see a lot more problems becoming feasible to address faster and with less people. I do think Orq.ai is making the right steps to facilitate that and that's what I'm really excited about.
Platform Solutions
Brand New Day loves Orq.ai's platform features
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