Bond Brand Loyalty Saves 50% in Costs by Migrating From Managed Spark to Snowflake

In any business, customer loyalty is the key to long-term success. Bond Brand Loyalty knows this better than anyone. For more than 40 years, the Toronto-based firm has been helping iconic brands like Amazon, Capital One, Ford and Harley-Davidson establish and maintain deep connections with their customers. These connections are driven by data collected at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

Each day, Bond's customer data platform (CDP) processes roughly 300 million transactions from over 100 million consumers. The platform combines this transactional data with the company's own research into customer behaviors and attitudes, as well as aggregated data from credit card partners to gain insights like share of wallet. Bond’s CDP then consolidates all this information within a data lake more than two petabytes in size.

But deriving insights from that data was often an arduous, expensive process, in large part because its previous managed Spark platform required too much hands-on work for its engineering teams. Needing a more streamlined, cost-effective way to analyze and understand customer behavior, Bond turned to Snowflake, resulting in better visibility into data and significant cost savings.

For Bond to manage its petabytes of data effectively, efficiency is key. A key advantage of Snowflake is that engineers no longer have to spin up clusters of compute resources before they can submit queries, which saves data teams hours of time each week. “The Snowflake platform is easier to use, and the UI makes it easier to maintain jobs,” says Damian Sietkiewicz, Bond’s Managing Director of Platforms, Data Engineering and Business Intelligence. “You actually see the execution times for each process.”  

Snowflake also provides greater visibility. With Bond's previous data management solution, queries from different clients were all running on the same platform, making it difficult to assign costs to specific clients without spending a lot of time tagging each resource. Snowflake's unified dashboard makes it easier to determine where compute resources are being used, and how to account for them. 

Initially, Bond was using its managed Spark solution to run analytics on its data, then using Snowflake to share insights across the organization. But with Snowpark’s library of runtime tools for building analytics applications, the team no longer needs both. Now, Bond manages and analyzes its data using Snowflake to create a collaborative platform for internal and external clients at scale — saving both time and the cost of paying for data ingress and egress.

The migration has proven so beneficial to Bond that it created its own framework to help clients transition from managed Spark or on-premises solutions to Snowflake. “We’re showing customers that when you migrate from a managed Spark platform to Snowflake, your costs and complexity go down, and we’re using our experience to help them realize those benefits at scale,” Silva says.

Along with its data lake, Bond launched its Synapze XI experience and insights platform on Snowflake. Separate Synapze modules allow Bond’s clients to benchmark, analyze and recommend offers and experiences for their loyalty programs, employee experience and customer journeys using advanced analytics. 

Available on Snowflake Marketplace, Synapze XI provides key metrics like loyalty scores and customer lifetime value, then allows Bond's customers to benchmark their performance against other industry players while still keeping their proprietary data safe. With Streamlit’s open source Python library, Bond’s data team can iterate quickly and understand which parts of the application are driving value.

"We migrated Synapze XI to Snowflake because the native app allowed us to productize it for our teams and clients,” says Francis Silva, Bond’s Executive Vice President of Digital and AI. “There are no data governance or security concerns because the native app runs in clients’ own Snowflake environments. It allows us to bring our IP and methodologies to our clients, without them seeing our data or us seeing theirs."

Using Synapze XI, one global financial services client merged Bond's data on customer attitudes with its own data on customer behavior, then used that information to increase engagement with their tactical marketing programs by 7%.

“The biggest advantage for our clients is that Snowflake allows them to create 360-degree customer profiles built specifically around loyalty data," Silva adds. "They can combine our data with their own while protecting both, and they can create these profiles quickly without needing specialized teams or expertise."

For Sietkiewicz, the primary benefits of moving to Snowflake are operational — better performance at a fraction of the cost. For Silva, it's the ability to offer more advanced analytics capabilities to clients, leading to a more productive long-term relationship. And this enhanced loyalty extends to Bond's technology partners as well. 

“What differentiates Snowflake is not just the technology, it's the partnership,” says Silva. “That's true across the entire Snowflake ecosystem — from leadership to engineering. When we choose to adopt a technology, it's about more than features, capabilities or costs. It's about our ability to find a true business partner who can help us get the greatest value from our technology investments.”