Snowflake connected with David Coluccio from S&P Global Market Intelligence at the Snowflake Data Cloud Tour to hear how the company is using the Snowflake Data Cloud to curate massive amounts of data and provide seamless access for its clients.

S&P Global’s foundation is rooted in providing essential insights to make more-informed decisions. It has turned information into insights for more than 160 years by delivering data, credit ratings, research, and more to financial institutions, corporations, and governments that require credible information to make sound business decisions. 

Today aggregating data is much less labor-intensive than it was when S&P Global was founded, but the amount of data now available would astound the company’s founders. 

“There’s an explosion of data today,” said S&P Global’s Managing Director of Data Management Solutions, David Coluccio. “It’s not only coming from traditional vendors but also from newer companies that are sharing data they once used only internally.” The Data Management Solutions team is responsible for integrating, linking, and structuring data and then delivering it to S&P Global clients via data feed, API, and cloud solutions.

Combining the Traditional with the Alternative

Historically, data sourced from S&P Global included traditional data such as financials, estimates, credit research, credit ratings, and more. Today, S&P Global offers a greater array of data coming from sectors including banks, insurance, real estate, energy, metals and mining, and more. In addition, there’s been an expansion in machine-readable textual data, including transcripts and fillings, along with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data as clients look to take advantage of formerly unstructured data and ESG demand increases. 

S&P Global clients need access to every data source, and they need to be able to combine and analyze that data to meet changing business opportunities. But vetting for quality, useful data and then unifying so much data from multiple sources is a monumental undertaking.

“In addition to financial data that has been utilized for years, there’s now a huge interest in alternative, unstructured data that can be incorporated into clients’ financial analysis. But we are finding that only about 5% of alternative data sets that we review meet S&P Global’s vigorous selection criteria and are added to the platform. It takes an enormous amount of work to bring the data in, link it, structure it, and analyze it to find those diamonds in the rough.”

—David Coluccio, Managing Director of Data Management Solutions, S&P Global Market Intelligence

Curated Data

Data users need a partner to do more than simply provide access to data; rather, they need access to clean, accurate, and reliable data immediately so they can analyze it, see if it adds value, and integrate it into their decision-making processes. 

Using the Snowflake Data Cloud and Snowflake Data Marketplace, S&P Global now has an environment to quickly deliver its structured and linked data to clients in a seamless way. 

“Having instant access to data is key. We need to be able to talk to a client, explain a data set, highlight what we have, and then give them immediate access to it. In the past, if they were interested in analyzing a fundamental data set, it could take weeks to load and structure the data before anyone could analyze it. With Snowflake, we can provide it to the client nearly instantly.”

—David Coluccio, Managing Director of Data Management Solutions Business, S&P Global 

Snowflake is equipped with hundreds of connectors to Tableau, Power BI, Alteryx, and other tools, so S&P Global clients can seamlessly access data with tools they already use to streamline their processes and speed up their workflows.

“As data grows in size, it’s becoming more challenging for clients to utilize this data with traditional methods such as FTP delivery and on-premises data centers, so there’s a stampede toward the cloud. Fortunately, Snowflake was made for the cloud and is cloud-agnostic. Some of our clients use Amazon Web Services, some use Microsoft Azure, and others use Google Cloud Platform. The great thing about Snowflake is that it works in all those environments pending the client’s preference.”

—David Coluccio, Managing Director of Data Management Solutions Business, S&P Global Market Intelligence

Watch Snowflake’s 2021 Data Cloud Tour fireside chat with David Coluccio.