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State Street Accelerates Investment Insights by Building AI-Enhanced Alpha Data Platform on Snowflake

By building its Alpha Data Platform on Snowflake, State Street has increased productivity, halved labor costs and ramped up AI innovation to help investment managers make better decisions.

KEY RESULTS:

87%

Reduction of false data error alerts

25x

More productivity for data operations teams

Woman working on a tablet
State street logo
Industry
Financial Services
Location
Boston, MA

A pioneering financial institution that pursues true innovation

With banking roots dating back to 1792, State Street has long been at the forefront of financial breakthroughs. From serving as custodian of America’s first mutual fund to launching the first multicurrency accounting platform, the Boston-based bank has always focused on new technologies to help create better outcomes for the world’s institutional investors. 

Responsible for servicing 10% of global assets, State Street knows better than most how much data investment firms generate — and how siloed it can be. What’s more, unscalable data architectures make it difficult for firms to affordably store historical data, access real-time data and analyze time series data. 

Seeking to help its clients capture the breadth and depth of data generated across their investment processes, State Street decided to add to its list of firsts by developing State Street Alpha. This front-to-back asset-servicing platform helps managers make better decisions by bringing together data and analytics from across the investment lifecycle.

Requiring a modern, cloud-native foundation that would eliminate performance concerns and streamline infrastructure management, State Street turned to Snowflake to power Alpha Data Platform.

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“We've pivoted our Snowflake-powered data platform to help clients make investment decisions that are data-driven and informed by AI.”

Aman Thind
CTO, State Street Alpha
Story Highlights
  • More efficient operations: By adopting Alpha Data Platform, operations teams can simplify their data management processes and free up additional capacity for value-added work. 

  • Faster time to insight: By building Alpha Data Platform on Snowflake’s modern, cloud-native architecture, State Street has created a single source of enterprise truth for collecting, curating and validating investment firm data. 

  • Improved data quality: With Snowflake’s native AI and machine learning capabilities, State Street harnesses deep learning to supplement human-based data validation across data domains, which increases accuracy.

Halving total cost of labor, maximizing market potential

When initial development for the Alpha Data Platform began, State Street quickly realized that tuning and managing on-premises databases for optimal performance would have been time-consuming and complex — especially when multiplied across all of State Street Alpha’s users. Sharing raw data sets with clients would have involved replicating and moving data via custom extract, transform, load (ETL) pipelines. 

Growing demand for cloud-first solutions was another important factor for developing the platform. “Our data architecture needed to align with the client’s need for business agility and enable new approaches that solve traditional bottlenecks,” State Street’s Alpha Data Platform Product Owner, Jeff Shortis, says.

To provide this modern data backbone for Alpha, State Street turned to Snowflake on Azure. With Snowflake’s secure data sharing capabilities and seamless third-party data integrations, State Street built an industry-leading product. The platform allows for near real-time visibility across the investment enterprise. Portfolio managers can see intraday investable cash, pledged collateral, securities on loan, and risk exposures across geographies, asset classes and counterparties.

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“For investment firms, the ability to capture and analyze data across their front, middle and back office is a game changer. With Snowflake, our clients can operate from a timely, complete and accurate view of their data.”

John Plansky
Global Head of State Street Alpha

Snowflake data sharing allows the exchange of live data, versus requiring data to be updated on a daily or weekly basis. State Street also securely shares vendor data into a client’s environment in less than 10 minutes — a job that would normally take months with competing technologies. Efficient onboarding both reduces the Alpha Data Platform team’s total cost of labor by 50% and elevates client satisfaction. Since the platform’s launch in 2020, investment and wealth management firms, pension funds, and insurance companies such as Bank of Montreal, Lazard, Janus Henderson and Legal & General Investment Management have adopted State Street Alpha.

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“With Snowflake, we put data in our clients’ hands much faster — and with half the effort and resources.”

Jeff Shortis
Alpha Data Platform Product Owner

Generating 25x productivity gains with the help of AI

With a Snowflake-powered data foundation that offers native data security and governance, the team has been able to explore potential AI use cases for the platform. One of the State Street-built deep learning models focuses on data quality and anomaly detection. The model looks at different aspects of a portfolio to see if there are any market value issues that an analyst might need to verify. This happens in a rare circumstance when investment data is wrong, which can have a big impact on risk management models or portfolio evaluations. 

Typically, manual threshold-based filters are created to detect anomalies, resulting in a large number of false alerts that require manual investigation. State Street applied AI models, which learned to become more efficient at removing false positive alerts. They detected 100% of true exceptions and eliminated 87% of false positives — resulting in a 25x productivity gain for data operations teams who previously had to investigate each exception as a potential error.

Fostering faster, more affordable time to insights

Self-service data visualizations from the Alpha Data Platform, powered by Snowflake, surface new insights to help investment professionals trade smarter and respond faster to investors, regulators and partners. Delivering a single, current source of verified data promotes collaboration between risk, portfolio, compliance and trading teams. And near real-time access to large volumes of financial data accelerates time to insight, at a lower cost. 

Snowflake’s powerful data access and AI capabilities have allowed the State Street Alpha team to deliver innovation faster. Data doesn’t require movement, and Snowflake helps summarize and aggregate insights in near real time, so risk analysts and portfolio managers can query their data using natural language to get immediate and accurate answers.

Exploring the next frontier for financial services

As State Street looks forward, the team continues to strive for more firsts — especially using gen AI to benefit clients, partners and internal stakeholders. According to State Street CTO Aman Thind, “Gen AI will become the new standard to augment how we communicate to clients and the rest of the industry.” State Street engineers are developing a conversational interface to enable end users to ask complex questions about their investment portfolios. Whatever the future holds for the world of finance, State Street will continue empowering its customers and delivering results in partnership with technology leaders Snowflake and Azure.

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