With data being a substrate of enterprises, making the best use of it has become crucial.

Being in a position to influence public policy and create more standards, ADP Inc. uses Snowflake Inc.’s Financial Services Data Cloud to provide workers’ information almost instantaneously, helping solve issues like the need for talent, according to Jack Berkowitz (pictured, right), chief data officer of ADP.

“One of the things that we provide is compensation data,” Berkowitz stated. “We issue something called the “National Employment Report” that informs the world about what’s happening in the U.S. economy regarding workers. The thing that we’ve been able to do with Snowflake is to lower the time that it takes us to process and get that information out into the fingertips of people.”

Berkowitz and Rinesh Patel (pictured, left), global head of industry and financial services at Snowflake, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how ADP is revamping human capital management solutions using Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud. (* Disclosure below.) 

Data cloud as a stepping stone toward more innovation

Launched last year, Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud helps solve critical business and industry problems like ESG — environmental, social and governance — and quantitative research.

“It’s been an exciting 12 months … we’re trying to bring together a fragmented ecosystem across financial services,” Patel stated. “The aim is really to bring together key customers, data providers and solution providers across the different clouds to allow them to collaborate with data in a seamless way.”

ADP acts as an ESG facilitator in many companies. Through the “National Employment Report,” ADP is able to understand what’s happening in the U.S. economy, which aids in shaping data policy, according to Berkowitz.

“We move somewhere between two-and-a-half-trillion-dollars a year through our systems, and so we understand what’s happening in the economy,” he added.

Snowflake’s data-sharing capabilities reduce friction, enabling data owners not to lose control of it, according to Patel.

“I think industries existed with a lot of the physical movement of data. When you physically move data, you also move the data management challenges,” he said. “Ultimately, data sharing is taking away that friction that exists … so it’s easier to be able to make informed decisions with the data at hand across two counterparties.”

Through the Financial Services Data Cloud, ADP forms partnerships that enable monetization of data. For instance, the company announced a partnership with Intercontinental Exchange, or ICE, which takes ADP’s information and combines it with its own information to create a new data product that they in turn sell, Berkowitz explained.

The Financial Services Data Cloud has set the ball rolling in different industries, according to Patel.

“In terms of momentum, we’re a global organization that is verticalized,” he stated. “So we have increasingly more expertise and experience now within financial services that allow us to really engage and accelerate our momentum with the top banks, the biggest asset managers by [assets under management], insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds on Snowflake.”

Since intersecting data and security can be a nightmare, Snowflake tackles this challenge, Berkowitz explained.

“We want to make sure that the software and data can interoperate because we don’t want to be in the business of writing bridge code,” he stated. “The first thing is having the ecosystem so that the things are tested and can work together.”

In the post-pandemic era, machine learning is revolutionizing the services industry. As a result, new capabilities like supply chain optimization and data monetization are being created for better decision-making.

“We’re actually using the file distribution capabilities, whereby we use Snowflake as the data cloud for those clients,” Berkowitz stated. “Part of our data monetization is actually providing aggregated and anonymized information that helps other clients make business decisions. For supply chain optimization, we actually put the warehouses based on the population shifts.”

Using Snowflake’s Data Cloud, ADP can unlock diversity benchmarks, according to Berkowitz.

“On Snowflake, we launched capabilities about diversity benchmarks,” he noted. “For the first time, companies can understand their industry, size, location, diversity profile, and organization chart profile to differentiate or at least understand whether they are doing the right things inside the business.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Snowflake Summit event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Snowflake Summit event. Neither Snowflake, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE