BMLL, the independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3 data and analytics across global equity and futures markets, has announced a strategic investment from Snowflake Ventures. This comes on the heels of a $26 million Series B investment from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet, and IQ Capital in Q4 2022. The new partnership with Snowflake aims to revolutionise how market participants access and utilise Level 3 data on a global scale, according to the company.
The collaboration with Snowflake aligns with BMLL’s mission to broaden access to its granular order book data and analytics. The partnership aims to eliminate the need for expensive, in-house storage and data engineering, thereby accelerating time to insights. This is intended to make capabilities previously exclusive to sophisticated quant firms available to a broader market.
Snowflake’s growing client base in the capital markets now have the option to access BMLL’s Level 3 data and analytics – covering over 75 venues for equities, futures, and ETFs – directly via the Snowflake Marketplace and within their private clouds, meaning that they can combine their private trading data securely with BMLL’s curated market data.
“We initially came into contact with Snowflake through our collaboration with FactSet, where Snowflake served as the delivery mechanism,” Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, tells TradingTech Insight. “As a result, integrating with Snowflake has been on our product roadmap for quite a while. We’ve always aimed to feature our content on their marketplace, and this goal brought us closer to their team. From BMLL’s standpoint, we transform vast amounts of data into relevant, actionable information. The volume of data we store, manage, and curate is substantial. This raises the question: why do firms keep so much redundant data that serves no purpose? When it comes to applying quantitative analysis to this data, it’s widely acknowledged that quants spend about 80% of their time collecting, cleaning, and organising data. Only the remaining 20% is spent on productive analysis. Our unique selling point is that we save our clients that 80% of time. As for Snowflake, their interest aligns with content. It’s somewhat akin to the Netflix model; it’s not sufficient to merely distribute other people’s content—you need to have your own.”
The BMLL-Snowflake partnership comes as a result of significant synergies between the two firms, says Humphrey. “This partnership represents an excellent cloud application for the financial markets. BMLL holds petabytes of data, and it’s how firms utilise this data that sets them apart, not the mere fact of owning it or investing heavily in teams to manage it. Snowflake closely examined our content and grasped its value, which not only validates our claims about the data but also allows us to use their marketplace to genuinely democratise access to high-quality data. Traditionally, such data has been accessible only to the most sophisticated funds. Therefore, this is a highly beneficial investment and partnership for us.”
The value of the partnership goes beyond mere distribution of BMLL content through Snowflake, explains Humphrey. “One of the most effective uses of our data is its integration with a firm’s own private data. Snowflake can deliver to clients who have their own private clouds, and we can place our data into these environments. This allows firms to securely combine our data with their own, right within their private infrastructure. This ability to merge our data with a firm’s private data in a secure setting is incredibly potent, so Snowflake’s contribution extends well beyond simple data delivery.”
Kieran Kennedy, Head of Marketplace at Snowflake, commented: “BMLL has a great track record and proven traction in serving some of the world’s largest financial institutions, regulators, and academics. We’re excited to announce both our investment in and partnership with BMLL Technologies and to welcome BMLL to Snowflake Marketplace.”
Harsha Kapre of Snowflake Ventures added: “Our partnership with BMLL is an excellent example of a big data, cloud use-case for financial markets. By making BMLL’s data and analytics available via the Snowflake Marketplace, we deliver on increasing customer demand for core analytics and analytical workflows.”
Financial details of the investment have not been disclosed.
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