Unleash the Power of Data To Drive Innovation in Finance Industry

Unlocking the power of Snowflake’s new data cloud demands a smarter approach to BI, explains Charles Miglietti, the CEO and co-founder of Toucan Toco.

If you’re in the financial services space, then Snowflake needs no introduction. The cloud-data giant’s offerings are already being used by almost six out of 10 of the financial sector’s Fortune 500 companies, which rely on Snowflake to join the dots between their different business units and open the door to smarter, more streamlined decision-making. 

Now, Snowflake wants to take things to the next level. The data giant just announced the launch of its new financial services data cloud, a hub that brings together industry-specific datasets and governance capabilities, plus a wide range of tailored solutions from both Snowflake and third-party providers such as Amazon, Black Rock, and State Street. By bringing financial data and industry-specific tools into a single hub, Snowflake hopes to promote collaboration, foster innovation, and support creating a new generation of fintech products.

It’s a compelling vision but now it’s time to see if the fintech industry can deliver the goods. There’s no question that Snowflake’s financial services data cloud is an incredibly powerful tool for driving connectivity across financial organizations. But for financial services firms, connectivity is a means to an end, not a goal in its own right. To make the most of Snowflake’s new offering, we’ll need to find new ways to put our data to work.

Start Telling Stories

The key to using data effectively is to stop assuming that simply having data automatically makes your company smarter or leads to better decision-making. That’s core to the Snowflake value proposition, of course: instead of having data spread across multiple platforms and buried in silos across your organization, Snowflake gives you a cloud hub that lets you access and deploy data where and when it’s needed.

But connectivity and access to data is only one piece of the problem: you also have to put your data to effective use. Unfortunately, if we’re honest, the reality is that only a relatively small subset of any financial organization’s employees (let alone their customers!) truly know how to use data effectively. For the rest, data typically serves as either a fig-leaf that obscures muddy thinking or a distraction that complicates workflows and often gets ignored altogether.

To truly unlock the value in their data, organizations need both smart connective tissue helping them access data easily and powerful storytelling tools to help managers, frontline users, and customers find value and meaning in that data. Unless you’re a data scientist, you probably don’t think in numbers, you think by imagining, dreaming, and telling stories, and you need data infrastructure that facilitates rather than inhibits or distracts from that creative process.

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Humanize Your Data

That’s especially important for financial services companies because when money is on the line there’s a real risk that data can become a barrier between the company and its customers. After all, financial data often seems opaque to non-experts, so simply giving people a sheaf of numbers doesn’t empower them to make smarter decisions. In fact, agents or advisors sometimes default into a “just because” posture in which customers are expected to defer to what the data says without ever really understanding what it means.

Using Snowflake helps to overcome that by bringing data closer to customers and customer-facing teams — but we also need storytelling tools to unlock the value and meaning inherent in that data, and to present real insights in intuitive and flexible ways. 

At La Banque PostaleOpens a new window , for instance, smart data storytelling is being used to help sales agents use data to walk customers through complex issues. Because the data is presented using intuitive visualizations displayed on a tablet, agents can sit alongside customers instead of staring them down from behind a desk — a small gesture that helps to create a sense of collaboration and partnership during complex financial planning processes. 

Where people sit might sound unrelated to the powerful data features of Snowflake’s new cloud, but it’s a reminder that data’s utility often boils down to the way it’s used in real human interactions. Adding a data storytelling layer enables both frontline workers and customers to relate to data more fluidly and integrate it into workflows and interactions in ways that feel supportive and additive rather than like an additional layer of obfuscation.

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Put Your Data To Use

Of course, this is just one potential application for the data storytelling approach. Still, it’s a powerful example of the way that organizations and their customers benefit when data is put into action rather than simply allowed to gather dust. As Snowflake’s new financial services data cloud gains traction, and as organizations use their newfound connectivity to power real data storytelling initiatives, we’ll see plenty of additional benefits, including a faster path to fintech innovation, smarter and more accessible data information products, and more effective internal collaboration and external partnerships.

The reality is that using data effectively is a multi-step process. Organizations have already spent time and money gathering data from a wide range of internal and external sources and then spent more time and money moving their data into the cloud. Now, Snowflake is helping organizations to unify their data resources and make them accessible across their entire organization, a key step toward organizing and exploiting the value of that data. 

Closing Thoughts

The companies that truly drive the financial services industry forward, though, will be those that view Snowflake’s cloud offering not as a destination but as a starting point. We now live in a world in which data is more accessible and connected than ever. To realize the full potential of our data and the unique opportunities represented by new kinds of cloud data infrastructure, we also need to commit to innovating the ways in which we leverage and communicate our data. 

That means going beyond tired old BI paradigms and developing new ways to make data accessible to everyone. For financial services companies, it isn’t enough simply to have data on tap: we also need to find creative ways to tell compelling stories with it.

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