Snowflake hosted an excellent virtual event this week focused on Snowflake’s Data Cloud solutions for Financial Services. What we enjoyed about this Industry Vertical Snowflake “Summit” was the combination of business and technology content. When we launched our ITS solutions business long ago, our mission was Business/Technology Focused Solutions. We believed heavily in bringing the best of a combination of business and technology solutions where business teams and technology teams worked together. We wanted to avoid the pitfalls that I had seen with solutions just business-focused without technology considerations or collaboration. We also wanted to avoid what still happens too often, technology solutions with no or limited business value. [The entire reason that led to the product/market fit concepts]
If you were too busy and missed it then we have a list of the Financial Services Data Summit session recordings below. Check them out and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. We hope this is useful and enjoy!
Financial Services Data Summit Highlights and Take Aways
[Please continue to give us feedback on this Financial Services Summit and what were your favorite sessions. We learn so much from each other]
- 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. We were excited about the Data Provider Presentations from Acxiom,
- It is all about the customer. This was a common theme from Snowflake customers/partners like Blackrock, State Street, and the Data Providers especially. They emphasized the partnership with Snowflake and how this is enabling new data collaborations that were not possible before.
Financial Services Data Summit By the Numbers:
Hey, we love data and stats so we like to break down the sessions and presenters’ data. Here it is!
*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 overall though were focused on a mixture of financial services and processes combined with data technologies to improve the Financial Services business. There is a huge transformation happening here and Snowflake’s powerful data cloud is accelerating how Finacial Services companies transform. There was an interesting video as well that Capital One did that isn’t in the sessions. They emphasized how they were the first to jump into delivering Financial Services on the Cloud.
Data Science and Data Applications
Many of the presentations at the Financial Data Summit were related to building data applications on top of Snowflake. This was one of our favorites:
Building on Snowflake: Driving Platform Monetization with the Data Cloud.
Recording Link
Data Marketplace and Data Exchanges
From our perspective, this Financial Services Summit by far was about 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.
Check out our in-depth coverage of all the Financial Services Data Shares [coming soon – this week]
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:
1. 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.
Snowflake Data Provider Presentations:
Acxiom –Recording Link
Intelligent & FactSet – Recording Link
S&P Global – Recording Link
Full List – Snowflake Financial Services Sessions Recording Links:
| Session Name | Speakers | Speaker Company Name | Video Recording |
|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome and Executive Panel | Frank Slootman,Shelly Swanback,Stacey Cunningham,Rick Underwood,Elise Bergeron | Snowflake,Western Union,NYSE,Snowflake,Snowflake | Link |
| The Financial Services Data Cloud, Revealed | Austin Burkett,Joanna Johnston,Matthew J. Glickman,Randy Wigginton,Rinesh Patel | Refinitiv,Snowflake,Snowflake,Square,Snowflake | Link |
| Snowflake Customer Q&A | Christian Kleinerman,Elise Bergeron,Sudhir Nair,Matthew J. Glickman | Snowflake,Snowflake,BlackRock,Snowflake | Link |
| Building on Snowflake: Driving Platform Monetization with the Data Cloud | Bob Morrison,Marius Ndini,Matt Hill | Snowflake,Snowflake,Snowflake | Link |
| Leverage the Insurance Third Party Data Exchange | Naresh Shetty,Sampath Parthasarathy | Cognizant,Cognizant | Link |
| Manage Risk & Data Governance with the Snowflake Platform | Alex Gutow,Brad Romano,Rich Murnane | Snowflake,Snowflake,Snowflake | Link |
| Delivering Personalized Experiences with Customer 360-Degree Views | Andy Sanderson,Marcin Kulakowski,Shireen Irani | Snowflake,Snowflake,Snowflake | Link |
| Building Scalable, Data-Driven Engagement for Financial Services Companies | Olaf Tennhardt,Tom Boisvert | Deloitte,Deloitte | Link |
| Building a Connected Data Ecosystem for Accelerated Time-to-Insight with State Street Alpha Data Platform | Paul Zajac,Spiros Giannaros | Invesco,State Street | Link |
| Driving Operational Efficiencies and Innovation with S&P Global Data and Snowflake | John Schirripa,Young Cha,Justine Iverson | S&P Global,Blackstone,S&P Global | Link |
| Speeding Data Cloud Adoption and Business Transformation at Blackstone | Matt Turner,Jai Subrahmanyam | Alation,The Blackstone Group | Link |
| Get in the Flow of Actionable Data | Marc Rind | Fiserv | Link |
| Financial Services Deep Dive with Acxiom Data Experts | Patrick Duggan,Doug Hurst | Acxiom,Acxiom | Link |
| Making Financial Data More Accessible in the Cloud | Julie Hutchinson,Roland Anderson,Vincent Saulys | AWS,TP ICAP Data & Analytics,Amazon Web Services (AWS) | Link |
| The Transformative Power of Snowflake for Financial Regulatory Reporting and ESG Investment Management | Michael Barnes,Brandon Sutcliffe | EY,EY | Link |
| Accelerating Scale & Distribution with the FactSet-Snowflake Partnership | Peter Dorsey,Jake Hawkesworth | FactSet,Entelligent | Link |
| Becoming an Intelligent Organization Through Data Science | Greg Willis,Suresh Vadakath | Dataiku,Dataiku | 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.
