Northern Trust collaborates with Snowflake to enhance data sharing for asset servicing clients

Custodian becomes the latest securities services player to partner with Snowflake, following Citi and Broadridge.

By Jonathan Watkins
Northern Trust and Equity Data Science (EDS) – the analytics platform it invested in earlier this year – have collaborated with cloud-based data company, Snowflake for an initiative aimed at its asset servicing clients.

The project will see Northern Trust enhance secure data sharing and onboarding for asset servicing clients using investment data science capabilities from Snowflake – which has already partnered with Citi and Broadridge in the past six months.

The partnership will enable Northern Trust to update or change data elements and layout, making the solution agile and attuned to individual client needs, according to a statement.

Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud enables sharing on a single, integrated platform, optimising what had been a manual process dependent on physically extracting and delivering data files.

The collaboration with Snowflake optimises data management via cloud-native technology for Northern Trust.

“This is game-changing technology that replaces the old way of exchanging data,” said Paul Fahey, head of investment data science at Northern Trust. “Clients will have access to data insights that accelerate speed to market in ways that previously didn’t exist. Our goal is frictionless onboarding of new clients within 24 hours, and Snowflake’s Data Cloud puts that within reach.”

The move follows Northern Trust taking an equity stake in EDS in February this year as part of its end-to-end Whole Office strategy. The platform provides decision support tools to asset managers for idea generation, portfolio construction and risk management.

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