Snowflake Inc. today introduced a new solution, the Financial Services Data Cloud, that will make it easier for companies in the financial sector to process their business data.

Financial Services Data Cloud is based on Snowflake’s hugely popular cloud-based data platform. The solution has three major components: Snowflake’s native feature set, complementary products from partners and third-party datasets. Third-party datasets, in the context of the financial sector, are collections of market activity information that provide insights such as how the price of a given stock changed since its listing.

“The Financial Services Data Cloud will enable leaders in the space to create new revenue streams through future-forward products, collaborate within and across the new data economy for competitive advantage, while continuously maintaining security and governance standards,” said Matt Glickman, Snowflake’s vice president and global head of financial services. “With more than half of Fortune 500 financial services organizations using Snowflake, it’s clear that customers are leaning in with the Data Cloud.”

Snowflake has already been providing features that can help customers ensure they process data in compliance with the financial sector’s regulations. On occasion of the Financial Services Data Cloud making its debut, Snowflake today announced that its data platform is now also the first in the category to have been successfully evaluated against the CDMC Key Controls in an independent audit.

The CDMC Key Controls are best practices for ensuring enterprise cloud environments meet data security and privacy requirements. The best practices form a key part of a broader industry standard known as the CDMC framework.

Snowflake’s successful evaluation is significant because CDMC is emerging as a key standard in the financial sector. The industry consortium developing the framework includes Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Google LLC’s cloud business and more than 20 major financial institutions.

Snowflake customers can integrate partner-developed products into their Financial Services Data Cloud deployments to complement the native feature set. The company today detailed more than half a dozen partner-developed products that will be available for users. 

AWS will enable customers of its recently debuted Amazon FinSpace data management and analytics platform, which is specifically built for the financial sector, to access information they store in Snowflake. Startup Alation Inc., in turn, today launched a new application to help companies ensure records they keep in Snowflake comply with internal data governance rules. Dataiku Ltd. and BlackRock,, the world’s largest assessment managers, are also among the more than half-dozen firms that have teamed up with Snowflake for the Financial Services Data Cloud.

The third component of the solution, besides Snowflake’s native feature set and the partner-developed offerings, is a set of third-party financial datasets. The datasets are available via the Snowflake Data Marketplace. They are provided by companies including S&P Global Inc., Acxiom and FactSet Research Systems Inc., Snowflake said.

The financial sector is a major focus for Snowflake. The product revenue that the company attributes to customers in the sector more than doubled during the quarter ended July 31, it said today, and its platform is used by about 57% of the financial services providers on the Fortune 500 list. 

Image: Snowflake