BMLL, a provider of harmonised, historical Level 3 data and analytics across global equity and futures markets, has secured investment from Snowflake Ventures and entered into a partnership with Snowflake to deliver granular data and analytics to market participants globally. BMLL told BEST EXECUTION how its partnership with Snowflake will help firms leapfrog infrastructure planning and implementation time, lower costs and accelerate time to market.
The partnership removes the need for costly, in-house storage and data engineering, while accelerating time to insights.
BMLL CEO Paul Humphrey told BEST EXECUTION that the key to democratising access to global level 3 data — its wider mission — 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.
“Users of BMLL data within Snowflake Marketplace are able to share that data across their firms without replicating it multiple times across teams, further democratising access to the data set.
“This data collaboration – either within an organisation across its team members or business units, or externally with its ecosystem of partners, suppliers, and customers ultimately creates a value proposition that removes internal silos and barriers to accessing data by many. This increased transparency and collaboration kick-starts a virtuous cycle of continued innovation and differentiation,” Humphrey added.
Harsha Kapre, Snowflake Ventures said: “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 add initiatives.”
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; gaining actionable insights on market behaviour; and significantly enhancing their decision-making analysis.
There are other benefits to doing away with in-house storage and data engineering, other than cost.
Humphrey said: “With access to BMLL data, clients no longer have to store, manage and engineer this data themselves – over and over again. Accessing BMLL data through Snowflake Marketplace means the cost is significantly reduced as they do not need to allocate the vast amount of quant resources previously needed for data aggregation, cleansing and storage.
“Market participants need a deeper understanding of market shifts, liquidity dynamics and opportunities for alpha generation. In order to gain insight, they need access to high-quality, full-depth historical data – engineered and formatted ready for use. They also want the ability to combine BMLL’s historical market data with their own private order and trade data, thereby keeping control of their data in their own secure Snowflake cloud environment.
“The distribution of BMLL’s market data via the Snowflake Marketplace will enable this for so many more capital market participants, especially as Snowflake continues to expand its cloud-native platform. The partnership will allow Snowflake’s growing number of capital market clients to access BMLL’s best, large-scale content without the unnecessary headache of data engineering and cost of data maintenance.
“Clients no longer need to own, store and manage these data sets, time and time again. Instead, they can concentrate on differentiating themselves by what they do with the data, not by owning it! Essentially, BMLL’s partnership with Snowflake will help firms leapfrog infrastructure planning and implementation time, lower costs, and accelerate time to market.”
For example, market participants can use that data to conduct research, build strategies to generate alpha, analyse liquidity dynamics or venue performance.
“Clients who already have their own private Snowflake environment can then overlay their proprietary data sets to generate additional insights. This is one of the most powerful combinations for financial institutions as they look to differentiate their offering and generate returns,” Humphrey added.
The partnership with Snowflake forms just one plank of BMLL’s strategy to expand access to its data sets.
“Looking back over the last 12 months, I can say that we have delivered on what our clients have asked for. Since securing our Series B funding just under a year ago, we have worked tirelessly to expand our coverage to include Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and South Africa, with even more new data sets to be added over the coming months.”
Humphrey said the firm had also expanded its team of data scientists and engineers, as well as technical and development staff as well as its sales and go-to-market teams.
© Markets Media Europe 2023
