FIS Accelerates Capital Markets Compliance Platform on Snowflake for 33% Cost Savings
FIS, a global financial services technology provider, enhanced its capital markets compliance platform by migrating to Snowflake to achieve faster performance, reduced costs, and improved client stability.
Value Results Summary
FIS (Financial Information Services) is a leading financial services technology provider that processes $40 trillion annually across banking, capital markets, and asset management for 95% of the world's leading banks and major financial institutions. The company faced a critical challenge: legacy systems built on Sybase, SQL Server, and Hadoop could not scale to meet the demands of modern capital markets operations. With regulatory requirements from the SEC, FINRA, ESMA, and other bodies requiring the review and reporting of trades, orders, and accounts—generating more than 60 billion records and 21 petabytes of data daily—FIS needed a modern platform capable of handling this volume while improving performance, security, and governance. FIS Senior Director for Enterprise Strategy Patrick Donohue recognized that the company required a cloud-native solution that could deliver cloud modernization, enhanced data access, and innovation capabilities.
FIS selected Snowflake to rearchitect its capital markets platform and consolidate its fragmented compliance systems into a single source of truth. The company launched its Compliance Suite on Snowflake, designed to help financial institutions manage regulatory obligations including branch surveillance, communications surveillance, anti-money laundering, and regulatory reporting from a unified system. By migrating from its previous multi-system architecture to Snowflake's cloud platform, FIS achieved immediate performance improvements while dramatically reducing computational overhead. The platform now operates with 20% less compute power while delivering 2.5x faster execution speeds overall, with some critical compliance jobs running up to 20 times faster than previously. Data loading processes improved by 7x, and batch processing times accelerated approximately 5x for most clients. Additionally, the consolidated system reduced severity 1 and 2 level incidents by 68%, significantly improving platform stability.
The migration has enabled FIS to pass significant cost savings to customers while opening new avenues for innovation. The company achieved 33% cost savings across licenses, maintenance, and infrastructure overhead, translating to lower expenses and higher profitability. Snowflake's near-unlimited scalability eliminates concurrency issues, ensuring that one client's batch processing never impacts another's performance, and the company now processes up to a billion transactions without issue. Snowflake's native data-sharing capabilities have democratized data access, allowing clients direct access to their data rather than relying on daily extract structures. This improved data foundation has enabled FIS to innovate with new capabilities, including its recently launched Climate Risk Financial Modeler for assessing climate-related risks using environmental, social, and governance data. Looking ahead, FIS plans to layer additional AI and machine learning capabilities on top of Snowflake to further enhance compliance operations through anomaly detection and improved alert accuracy.
