According to a recent PwC U.S. CEO survey, 84% of CEOs plan to increase their investment in digital transformation.1 This investment is especially important in the financial services (FinServ) industry, where legacy systems often impede the smooth and speedy flow of data that is necessary for transaction processing. According to a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report sponsored by Snowflake, “The persistence of data silos puts a unified view of data out of reach for many FinServ firms. And that, in turn, makes it hard for them to achieve strategic goals such as offering individual and institutional customers a personalized experience across departments, channels, and touchpoints; meeting global regulatory standards; detecting and protecting against risk and fraud; and increasing overall operational efficiency.”

Snowflake’s Data Cloud equips banks, brokerages, insurers, and financial technology startups with the power of unified data that is easy to share securely. With the Data Cloud, FinServ companies are analyzing data more quickly to reach deeper insights, accessing third-party data sets to help generate valuable insights, and simplifying data pipelines while reducing data warehousing costs.

Here are some of the business benefits that Snowflake’s FinServ customers BlackRock, Capital One, and Western Union are achieving with the Data Cloud. 

BlackRock

BlackRock’s Aladdin Data Cloud, powered by Snowflake, is a strategic part of Snowflake’s Data Cloud. This managed data solution will allow companies to combine Aladdin portfolio data with non-Aladdin data, analyze it faster, and create custom applications and dashboards using Aladdin Studio—BlackRock’s platform for developers. With analysis-ready data, preloaded with rich front-to-back Aladdin data sets, and reporting built for investment teams, organizations will have a single control plane to make data-driven decisions around portfolio management, trade execution, investment operations, analysis, and risk management.

BlackRock is partnering with Snowflake to power Aladdin Data Cloud because Snowflake’s robust technology platform provides near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Data is freed from silos and stored in a central, unified location, enabling easier access and faster insights that lead to more-informed investment decisions, and better client experiences. The powerful capabilities of Snowflake’s Data Cloud will enable Aladdin clients to supercharge their use of data across their organization by enabling them to align their investments data strategy with their broader cloud and data strategy.

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Capital One

Capital One relies on Snowflake to scale its data operations and stay ahead of its ever-changing customer needs. In moving to the cloud, Capital One sought an elastic and scalable platform that could seamlessly support, with no degradation in performance, thousands of analysts running complex models involving millions of queries. The platform also had to comply with the banking industry’s strict security and regulatory requirements. Capital One chose the Snowflake Data Cloud because it met all these needs.

Capital One uses the Snowflake Data Cloud to understand the changes happening in the world and react quickly to address its customers’ evolving needs. That includes using Snowflake Data Marketplace, which provides quick access to third-party data sets to help generate valuable insights. The bank has also been able to control costs, thanks in part to Snowflake’s consumption-based pricing, which allows customers to expand their usage over time. The Data Cloud gives Capital One insight into metrics so it can track consumption, control any waste or sprawl, and analyze which internal groups are using which resources. Capital One pays only for the resources it needs and has the option to spin up additional compute power if it’s needed.

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Western Union

Snowflake’s Data Cloud delivers a single and seamless experience for Western Union across multiple public clouds, including AWS and GCP. As a multinational financial institution, Snowflake’s multi-cloud capabilities enable Western Union to comply with local regulations and ensure business continuity to protect customer data. Snowflake provides the flexibility to pick the best cloud for each use case and replicate data between clouds without additional pipelines. Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture scales instantly to handle Western Union’s data, users, and workloads without resource contention. Consolidating more than 30 data stores into Snowflake enables richer insights for a fraction of the data engineering effort. Connectivity to a variety of BI tools, including ThoughtSpot and Tableau, makes it possible for engineers to build and deploy dashboards in days instead of weeks. Snowflake’s fully managed infrastructure and easy-to-navigate interface solved Western Union’s data operations challenges and freed more resources for analytics.

Architecting on Snowflake provides a single source of truth that aligns with Western Union’s multi-cloud strategy and reduces the company’s data warehousing costs by more than 50%. Simplifying Western Union’s data pipeline with Snowflake delivers a tangible cost savings. And data science teams can source data, develop and train models in external machine learning platforms, and effortlessly push their results into Snowflake.

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For more information on how Snowflake’s Data Cloud can help your financial services company meet ever-changing customer expectations, register for our online Financial Services Data Summit, which will be held September 14. This free half-day event will showcase how Snowflake’s Data Cloud helps financial services organizations automate routine and mission-critical processes, meet and exceed regulatory requirements, and transform business models with data to unlock new revenue streams.


  1. pwc.to/2Y1IsLG