Cape Privacy + Snowflake: Breaking Down Barriers for Financial Services

The financial services industry has a reputation for being highly risk averse. Institutions that are entrusted with the wealth of individuals and organizations, and that are under strict scrutiny from state and federal regulators, are right to be cautious in their affairs. That's because the trust on which they stake their reputations is as important as the assets that are on their balance sheets. Banks, investment firms, brokerage houses, and other financial services organizations must be extremely careful with their customers' money. That's why it is counterintuitive to learn that risk-averse financial services organizations have a voracious appetite for new and innovative technologies. But reconciling the two ideas makes perfect sense when you understand that new technologies are key components to minimizing risk and maximizing opportunities in a competitive marketplace.  In our recent webinar, Cape Privacy CEO Che Wijesinghe talked with Snowflake's Bill Schoeffel, Area Director, Financial Services Major Accounts; and Tarik Dwiek, Senior Director of Technology Alliances, to get their perspectives of how the data cloud company is approaching innovative new technologies and technology partnerships to build a strong value proposition for its financial services data cloud customers.

A Quadrillion Dollars Worth of Data

One key component to the Snowflake strategy is to offer a broad range of tools that financial services organizations can use to monetize their vast data stores. Snowflake works with many of the world's largest financial services firms, including financial infrastructure operator Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTC), whose systems process more than a quadrillion dollars in transactions per year. That's a lot of data, and a lot of potential to provide valuable insights to the organizations that use DTC to process those transactions. But if moving and operationalizing that data presents a risk, the issue is a non-starter.  "If you think about the value of that data to the market, and what they are trying to do to monetize that data, the speed that they can get the artifacts around that data in the hands of folks that can leverage it is extremely important," Schoeffel said.

Overcoming Three Decades of Complexity

One element that hampers the financial services industry is that the appetite for technologies that can help them process, store, and analyze data have accumulated over the years, resulting in a complex of systems that may not operate in the most efficient or secure manner, but that have grown over time out of necessity.  "Think about the legacy technologies out there and the 20 to 30 years of intellectual capital that's built up with on-premises technologies," Schoeffel said. "Getting that data into usable formats is a big challenge."

Breaking Down Barriers

That's why there is a recognition within financial services that a migration to the cloud is needed to take full advantage of the new tools that are available to them that could enable greater levels of data monetization. But there are barriers that prevent organizations from safely sharing data that is highly regulated and highly sensitive. That data may contain personally identifiable information (PII) associated with consumers and protected under various privacy laws; it may be associated with corporate financial data that is protected under regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX); or it may simply be regarded as intellectual property that a financial services firm wishes to keep secure for competitive reasons.  If that data were encrypted from the moment of capture, and if it could be easily moved, shared, and operationalized even while remaining encrypted, that would solve a lot of the security and regulatory challenges that currently prevent most classified financial data from being monetized. That is where Cape Privacy comes into play.  "If you look at our charter, our technology partner ecosystem, it's all about ensuring customer success through leveraging choice and taking advantage of best of breed technologies that are deeply integrated into Snowflake," Dwiek explained. "How do we add to that ecosystem to provide even more enterprise rich solutions? This is why I'm excited about what we're doing with Cape Privacy."

An Exciting Time and an Exciting Partnership

Cape Privacy's unique combination of secret sharing and secure, multiparty computation eliminates the friction between operationalization and risk that has traditionally existed when trying to process data. That is because Cape Privacy enables financial services organizations to keep their most classified data encrypted while still allowing them to move it into the cloud and use it to generate valuable insights through powerful AI prediction models.    "Think about every piece of data within the financial world being available, and then you eliminate all those barriers to success," Schoeffel said about Snowflake's partnership with Cape Privacy. "That's what we're striving for… and it's a very exciting time."  The full Cape Privacy webinar is available for viewing here. To apply for exclusive early access to our self-service platform, sign up here. To book a meeting to see us in person at Snowflake Summit, contact us here.