RLAM Builds a Trusted Investment Data Foundation with Snowflake

Finance is a data-driven business. Therefore, in private markets, particularly, you do need to have bespoke models in order to analyse, risk assess, to really understand the investment, and data is at the heart of that.

Royal London Asset Management is a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal London Group. We are the asset investment side. We have 230 billion dollars of assets under management currently. We deal with a large amount of investment for the Royal London Group and external clients. There is a lot of investment decision that’s made off of data. There’s a lot of customer insight, but predominantly around that investment data. It’s key that the data is up to date, its accurate, and secured in the correct manner. Previously, like a lot of organisations, we had data in lots of different silos. We looked at re-engineering our data platform from scratch. One of the key reasons for moving over to Snowflake was we were moving into BlackRock Aladdin solution. They have an Aladdin Data Cloud, which is Snowflake-driven, so that would give us the data share capability and make it a lot easier and quicker to get that data into our platform. We now have a presentation layer into the business that is a curated, guaranteed set of gold data to come to and use. We’re able to govern it. We’re able to secure it and have faith in that data being accessible to the right people at the right time. The fact that we were building a strong data platform has allowed us to leverage Snowflake Coco, and other AI parts of the platform on top of it.

The advantages of having Coco there means that we can actually spin up projects really quickly. Whether that’s a streamlit app, a task, an agent, you’re able to spin up in an afternoon, where it might have been a six-month dev project before.

We’ve gone from around about 150 active users on the platform early start this year to around 600 active users on the platform. So its brought people in to use the data.

The difference now with Snowflake and Coco is that it puts the power in the hands of the user. They can go and find this information themselves just in a natural language way, and that’s fundamentally different to the ways we worked in the past. And we’re really starting to see patterns of behaviour change in how people go and problem solve in their day-to-day. A very simple example of where Coco has really optimised a business process in certain types of monthly reporting. Historically, this could be quite a laborious exercise. What was a 45-minute boring job is now a teams message with a auto-filled report, and that has a huge potential to change how our business works and is optimised.

Snowflake as a platform is phenomenal. The acceleration of growth within the Snowflake platform and the capabilities it offers us is now huge. To the point where we look at what could we build on top of Snowflake and make that one autonomous platform that we can use.