For almost a quarter-century, Matthew Glickman worked at Goldman Sachs, where he was responsible for the entire data platform for the firm’s asset management arm. After grappling with a variety of data problems at Goldman, he’s now on the solving end, helping guide cloud-based data warehousing company Snowflake as it begins a push to win over buy-side firms, exchanges, and financial data providers.

Part of the reason he joined Snowflake five years ago was because of a persistent problem he encountered on both the trading and asset management sides of Goldman—there was no single place in the organization where all analysts, technologists, and business users, alike, could see the same data at the same time, “without having to worry about which version of which thing was in which report,” says Glickman, who serves as vice president of customer and product strategy at Snowflake.

“You’re basically getting the wrong answers, or answers that would be close enough, but not really the ones you should be making decisions on,” Glickman says. “And it wasn’t just me. I think there is a much more significant, pent-up demand for having greater access to data and solving analytical problems in the daily course of running a business that is just more acute in financial services than in other verticals.”

The data silo problem, as it’s called, plagues many companies that weren’t born cloud-native, but it’s particularly pressing at asset managers due to the number of different data feeds they accumulate internally and consume from third parties.

Snowflake, which filed to go public earlier this week and is valued at more than $12 billion, operates as an enterprise data layer that sits on top of any cloud provider, including Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

It was first hosted on solely AWS in 2014, using Amazon S3 for storage space. Four years later, it expanded to count Microsoft Azure among possible hosts. Only last year, however, did Google Cloud Platform (GCP) jump aboard, announcing its own strategic partnership with Snowflake, with the cloud giant writing in a blog post that it had “experienced a growing demand from customers to operationalize Snowflake on GCP for better performance and reliability.”

Users keep their cloud provider, or choose one based on their leanings toward other tools or their own strategic relationships, and Snowflake works across the service of their choosing. The platform looks and works the same as the next user’s does, no matter the underlying provider.

When Glickman sat down with WatersTechnology for a demo last week, he had just gotten off the phone with FactSet, which, in May, became the first major data provider to make its data available via the Snowflake Data Marketplace. He says FactSet is key in helping Snowflake advance its next wave of financial use cases, which include helping banks and buy-side firms break down their internal silos and connect to multiple tiers of internal, partner, and third-party data in the same place without having to copy and move it across systems.

“We’re effectively positioning ourselves as this new breed of data cloud,” Glickman says. “Instead of having your data locked up in internal applications or internal clouds—or instead of having to manage infrastructure and having data accumulate wherever your infrastructure plant is—[we have] your data consolidated in a data cloud that can not only bring these places together, but [also] allow it work across clouds and across regions.”

Beyond data storage, end-users are also using Snowflake to run build client-facing applications, run data science and data engineering workloads, and perform analytics. Additionally, a consumer banking company is utilizing Snowflake to manage its cybersecurity efforts. 

Glickman also believes Snowflake offers a unique value proposition to exchanges, as tick data and time-series data, which often comprise gigantic databases, fit well within the company’s big data wheelhouse. FactSet is in the process of injecting its own tick database into Snowflake, said FactSet CTO Gene Fernandez in May, while speaking with WatersTechnology, and Snowflake is already working with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on how to make its data easier to access for the pair’s overlapping clients.

“[NYSE] got in early just because they had legacy platforms that were just not meeting the needs they had. And it was pretty acute, given the size of data and history of data that they have,” Glickman says.

NYSE did not respond to request for comment in time for publication.

Now that Snowflake has established a base of clients from across the industry—which include a variety of data providers, like FactSet and MSCI—it is offering a pathway for exchanges to leverage the company as a data pipeline. Exchanges can move away from replicating and repackaging market data through different channels, which forces data consumers to build and maintain their own custom pipelines and infrastructures. 

“You have this very interesting alignment, where we need our customers to get data as timely and as simply as possible, which is effectively putting pressure on the ecosystem to transform how they’re getting data to their clients,” Glickman says.