BMLL, the leading, independent provider of harmonised, historical Level 3 data and analytics across global equity and futures markets, today announced that the company has secured investment from Snowflake Ventures and entered into a partnership with Snowflake to deliver granular data and analytics to market participants globally. The news follows the $26m Series B investment from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ Capital in Q4 2022.

The Snowflake partnership delivers against the BMLL mission to broaden access to its granular order book data and analytics on a global scale. Further, it is revolutionising the way market participants can access and use Level 3 data: stored, curated and harmonised by BMLL, and delivered globally via the Snowflake Marketplace. The partnership removes the need for costly, in-house storage and data engineering while accelerating time to insights, making capabilities that were once the preserve of the most sophisticated quantitative firms available to the wider market.

Snowflake’s increasing number of capital market clients are now able to access BMLL data and analytics covering 75+ venues for equities, futures and ETFs via the growing Snowflake Marketplace and within their private clouds. This allows capital market clients to combine their private trading data securely with BMLL’s curated market data to create enhanced, augmented and new proprietary data sets; gain actionable insights on market behaviour; and significantly enhance their decision-making analysis.

Key to democratising access to Level 3 data, is to give market participants choices in how they access this data. Making BMLL data available via the Snowflake Marketplace enables seamless data access at scale in addition to the currently available API and FTP options.

FactSet was the first to access BMLL’s granular order book history and analytics via Snowflake to address the needs of clients across a wide range of use cases, including Quant Research, Back Testing, Best Execution, Transaction Cost Analysis (TCA), Compliance, Surveillance and Risk.  The joint BMLL FactSet historical product raises the bar on the typical quality available in the historical data market space.
 

Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, said: “We are very excited to have secured strategic investment from Snowflake Ventures. They are backing, and are aligned with, our mission to democratise access to high-quality, large-scale historical data because BMLL’s data and analytics is one of the best use-cases for large-scale, financial market data in the cloud. Financial market players, including Snowflake’s customers, do not need to dedicate time and precious resources to engineer these large unstructured data sets to make them usable, and store unusable data in the cloud, over and over again. The cost and collective inefficiency of every organisation doing this themselves, is simply eye watering. We make our vast warehouse of curated Level 3 data and analytics readily available to the market and ultimately ensure that everyone can optimise their data capabilities. Clients differentiate themselves by what they do with this data, not by owning it.”

“At a time when the demand for data engineering and quant resources is at an all-time high and financial institutions are looking to optimise their operating costs and ‘run-the-bank’ budgets, it is no surprise that firms are looking to remove the cost of storing vast quantities of unusable historic content on-premise from their balance sheets. Increasingly, we are witnessing a considerable shift away from firms investing millions of dollars on quant resources to engineer this data to make it usable when high quality, curated and maintained historic data and best-in-class analytics are available for all to use.”

The partnership between BMLL and Snowflake comes at a time of significant developments in the cloud provider landscape. The industry is engaged in a battle for the cloud, with household names increasingly collaborating with large financial institutions in order to secure market share. “What will ultimately win in the cloud is content.  Just like Netflix and others had to evolve to produce their own content, rather than simply distribute other companies’ movies, cloud companies will need to differentiate themselves with the content they carry and make available to their community of users.  Snowflake is on the front foot in this race, which is why we are delighted to be partnering with them,” added Humphrey.

Kieran Kennedy, Head of Marketplace at Snowflake, said: “As we continue to increase our footprint and use cases within financial services, we want to align ourselves with the best-in-class content providers.  BMLL has a great track record and proven traction in serving some of the world’s largest financial institutions, regulators and academics, all seeking to gain a deeper understanding of market shifts, liquidity dynamics and alpha generation. We’re excited to announce both our investment in and partnership with BMLL Technologies and to welcome BMLL to Snowflake Marketplace.

Harsha Kapre, Snowflake Ventures,  “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.  By partnering with the best content providers like BMLL, we empower firms to access the best, large-scale content without the increasingly unnecessary headache of on-premise storage and costly data movement while enabling them to focus resources on value-added initiatives.” 

Snowflake enables every organisation to mobilise its data, unite siloed data, discover and securely share data and power data applications. Snowflake’s mission is to help organisations have seamless access to explore, share, and unlock the true value of their data, on a global scale. 

Snowflake Marketplace allows customers to securely acquire and access third-party data sets, tools and applications, and complementary data services—all without having to move or copy data. At the same time, Snowflake Data Cloud enables an organisation’s most critical workloads, including seamless data collaboration within an organisation, across its business units, with its ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers.