Snowflake Inc. today unveiled its first set of bundled artificial intelligence tools oriented toward a vertical industry. Cortex AI for Financial Services encompasses a suite of capabilities and data partnerships aimed at banks, insurers and investment firms.

The company also announced the Snowflake-hosted Model Context Protocol Server in public preview, providing a secure and standardized way for users to connect enterprise data with third-party AI agents and data sources.

While the company has rolled out numerous AI tools across its platform over the past year, this is the first time it has addressed a specific industry. Rival Databricks Inc. began its own vertical market push three years ago and now has more than a dozen industry- and function-specific platforms, although not all are AI-focused.

Financial services was chosen as the first vertical because of strong demand and Snowflake’s large footprint in that industry, said Baris Gultekin, the company’s vice president of AI. “These are customers that are using our AI products heavily, so we wanted to make these solutions a lot easier for them to consume,” he said.

Snowflake’s offering doesn’t include any new technology but packages existing products and partnerships. “There’s nothing new here in terms of new products,” Gultekin said. “It’s the way they’re being packaged together.”

The package combines Snowflake’s AI tools with data from partners such as FactSet Research Systems Inc., MSCI Inc., the Associated Press, Washington Post and Investopedia. Snowflake said the goal is to allow financial institutions to build AI models and agents inside its secure boundary, while also drawing from external sources.

The managed MCP Server provides the technical underpinning for this approach. MCP is a specification for connecting large language models to data, application programming interfaces and external services. Snowflake already supported the MCP standard, but the new announcement introduces a hosted server managed by company itself.

“This is a Snowflake-hosted MCP server where we handle everything from authorization to all of the data processing,” Gultekin said. “That MCP server can then be used to plug into interfaces for services such as Cursor, Anthropic and ChatGPT.” The MCP Server is available to all Snowflake customers, not just those in financial services.

Pricing will follow Snowflake’s existing function-based model. Supporting services such as quick starts, code samples and sales enablement will be included to help customers adopt the tools.

Snowflake indicated that additional vertical-specific bundles are under consideration. “This is our first foray,” Gultekin said. “We are definitely looking into other options as well.”

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