BMLL announced it’s secured investment from Snowflake Ventures and entered into a partnership to deliver granular data and analytics to market participants globally. The news follows the $26 million Series B investment from Nasdaq Ventures, FactSet and IQ Capital in Q4 2022.
While financial details are not disclosed, BMLL’s CEO, Paul Humphrey, said in an email that Snowflake “invested at the same terms as our previous Series B investors, so there is no deterioration of our valuation” and “they have been welcome to join the existing investors.” Since securing the Series B funding BMLL has expanded coverage to include Japan, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and South Africa.
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.
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.
Paul Humphrey, CEO of BMLL, said in a statement: “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 organization 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 optimize 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,” he added.
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 in a statement: “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, at Snowflake Ventures, said in a statement: “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 add initiatives.”