- Snowflake, which focuses on data warehousing and sharing, launched a finance-dedicated cloud.
- It combines finance-specific datasets, security protocols, and access to third-party services.
- The launch comes as other cloud specialists release tools aimed at finance firms.
Snowflake is looking to carve out its own spot on Wall Street with a new finance-specific cloud.
The data warehousing company launched the Financial Services Data Cloud on Tuesday, building on its general data cloud that went live in 2020 and helps customers manage and analyze data across public-cloud providers.
"This is all about us leaning in closer to the kinds of problems that our customers are trying to solve," Matthew Glickman, VP of consumer product and global head of financial services, told Insider. "Data Cloud has been generically for all industries, and we're basically taking an industry-by-industry approach to say, 'What are the core capabilities that are customers are all leveraging?'"
Snowflake's finance-specific data cloud caters to financial institutions such as banks, hedge funds, and asset managers, helping them better manage their data that sits with public-cloud providers. Early sign ups include BlackRock, Capital One, NYSE, Refinitiv, and Square, to name a few.
The new data cloud has three main features, Glickman said.
It gives users access to finance-specific datasets from providers like S&P Global Market Intelligence, FactSet, and Refinitiv.
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It incorporates security-related capabilities, like roles-based access control, and follows regulatory guidelines established by the EDM Council, which focuses on data compliance and security for financial institutions migrating to the cloud.
Finally, the data cloud includes third-party tools, such as Amazon's recently launched data management and analytics service and BlackRock's Aladdin Data Cloud., of which Snowflake is already a key partner.
Snowflake is also developing so-called "solution accelerators," Glickman added. These are templates with reference architectures designed to quickly stand up some of the most commonly-requested features among financial institutions. Some of the first accelerators to be rolled out include templates for retail banks that want to produce a 360-degree view of its customers with data, or asset managers that want to incorporate ESG and alternative data.
As part of the new cloud, Snowflake will also make it easier for customers to share third-party data between virtual private clouds hosted on AWS, Azure, or GCP, which has been a common request among its most security-sensitive customers, Glickman said.
The debut comes as the chemistry between public cloud providers and Wall Street firms continues to heat up. IBM and Microsoft launched finance-specific business verticals earlier this year, and AWS and Google Cloud introduced financial data and analytics services.
Financial institutions, on the flip side, have started to name preferred public cloud partners in a step away from the multi-cloud strategy that dominated early cloud adoption years.
Snowflake, for its part, has doubled the number of its financial-services customers year-over-year, though a spokesperson declined to disclose the total number of banking customers and the number of customers onboarded to the new financial-services cloud.