Snowflake Financial Data Summit:
Snowflake held an excellent virtual event this week, focusing on Snowflake’s Data Cloud solutions for Financial Services. We appreciated the combination of business and technology content during this Industry Vertical Snowflake “Summit.” Our mission, when launching our ITS solutions business, was to provide Business/Technology Focused Solutions.
We firmly believe in bringing the best of both worlds, where business teams and technology teams work together. We wanted to avoid the pitfalls of solutions that were solely business-focused, without considering technology or collaboration. We also sought to avoid technology solutions that lacked business value or had limited value, which led to the product/market fit concepts.
Financial Services Data Summit Highlights and Take Aways
- Major emphasis on the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud and its partners such as BlackRock, Invesco, State Street, Fiserv, etc.
- Financial Services Data Provider Presentations. During the conference, we were excited to attend the Data Provider Presentations from Acxiom. The presentations provided us with valuable insights into the data industry and the latest trends in data collection and analysis. Acxiom’s experts shared their experiences and knowledge about the challenges and opportunities of working with large datasets, as well as the best practices for data management and security.
- It is all about the customer. This was a recurring topic among Snowflake customers and partners such as Blackrock, State Street, and data providers. They highlighted the strong partnership with Snowflake and how it has facilitated new data collaborations that were previously unattainable.
Financial Services Data Summit By the Numbers:
- Sessions – 17 Tracks – 4 [Customer Centricity – Risk and Data Governance – Digitalize Operations – Platform Monetization] Speakers – 44 Speakers by type.
| Presenter Company Type | Count | Breakdown % |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake | 16 | 37.21% |
| Customers | 9 | 20.93% |
| Partners – Consulting | 6 | 13.95% |
| Partners – Data Providers | 7 | 16.28% |
| Partners – Products | 5 | 11.63% |
Data Workload Financial Services Recap:
Data Warehousing, Engineering, Data Lakes:
We still think this Data Warehousing is the workload that works best with Snowflake and what it was originally designed for. We see many businesses within Financial Services moving to the Snowflake Data Cloud for their Data Warehouse workloads. Many of the Financial Services companies who presented at the summit also are moving to a combination of Data Lakes and Data Warehousing. The presentations focused on a mix of financial services and processes combined with data technologies to improve the financial services business. Snowflake’s data cloud is accelerating how financial services companies transform. Capital One shared an interesting video about being the first to deliver financial services on the cloud, which was not included in the sessions.
Data Science and Data Applications:
Many of the presentations at the Financial Data Summit were related to building data applications on top of Snowflake.
Data Marketplace and Data Exchanges:
From our perspective, the focus of the Financial Services Summit was the Financial Services Data Cloud. The main highlight of Blackrock’s Aladdin Data Cloud and Q&A around that was one of the main presentations. There was also a very large focus on Financial Services Data Providers of Acxiom, Intelligence, FactSet, etc., and on the Data Cloud Data and Services they provide.
Snowflake Data Provider Presentations:
Acxiom – Recording Link
Intelligent & FactSet – Recording Link
S&P Global – Recording Link
Financial Services Data Cloud Announced:
Besides the summit event, Snowflake announced the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud as well. We view this as really just a subset of the overall Snowflake Data Cloud vision and definition. We assume Snowflake will continue to roll out industry vertical conceptual concepts of Data Clouds. This is super interesting and transformative at many levels. It is a massive movement to more centralized and shared data versus the historical data silos that have developed within companies.
This is the statement from the press release: “Financial Services Data Cloud, which unites Snowflake’s industry-tailored platform governance capabilities, Snowflake- and partner-delivered solutions, and industry-critical datasets, to help Financial Services organizations revolutionize how they use data to drive business growth and deliver better customer experiences.”
At a high level, this is pretty awesome ****“theoretically” and aligns with a lot of the thought leadership work I’m doing around moving from a paradigm of on-premise closed data systems and silos to an ever-evolving worldwide concept of integrated data.
Conclusion:
The Snowflake Financial Services Data Summit was an excellent first Vertical Industry Summit with major Financial Services Customers and Partners such as BlackRock, State Street, Invesco, Fiserv, Square, NYSE, Wester Union, Acxiom, etc. Our favorites [from a practical learning perspective] were:
- Fiserv CTO Marc did a great job in this presentation demonstrating Fiserv Applications/Tools on top of Snowflake. Recording Link
2. Building on Snowflake: Driving Platform Monetization with the Data Cloud. Recording Link
There were many many other great presentations though as well from Providers and Snowflake partners like Alation, AWS, etc.
