Solaris Decentralizes Access and Delivers Data Faster With Snowflake

Learn how Europe’s leading embedded finance provider delivers data faster, decentralizes access and improves lineage controls with Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

Since 2015, Solaris Group has worked to bridge the gap between finance and technology. With its embedded finance platform, it has brought banking-as-a-service products—including digital bank accounts, verification, card payment and lending solutions—to organizations around the world.

After several years of focusing on growth, Solaris has now turned its attention to revenue. As part of this strategic shift, the embedded finance provider plans to make the most of its data to improve fraud detection, optimize reporting and other operational processes, and create a decentralized ecosystem that empowers teams across Solaris.

This shift has put a lot of pressure on the shoulders of Solaris’ data team. But Roy Ben David, Group Director Data & Analytics at Solaris, has a secret weapon that helps him meet all demands from the business—while empowering internal teams and partners alike.

Solaris is no stranger to using cloud solutions to drive efficient processes. “The whole business has operated in the cloud since day one,” explained Ben David. “But while our existing provider offers amazing solutions, we found a few challenges in how we had to manage data access and lineage.”

As a dynamic company making regular, rapid changes to its business, these lineage and access problems combined to have a significant impact on IT operations. “It created a lot of risks,” added Ben David. “Instead of thinking about innovation, we had to focus entirely on just keeping things live. We wanted to move away from being a bottleneck to become a trusted enabler for the business.”

Ben David and his team began assessing different cloud providers that might offer new ways to manage Solaris’ data. Ben David was keen to ensure the company’s data management was built on a solid foundation, and spared no detail in his search.

“We had many requirements,” he explained. “We needed a partner that could integrate with our existing solutions, deliver the full set of data capabilities out of the box, offer a consumption-based model, and have a high standard of security. With all of this in mind, our choice was obvious.”

Solaris chose to integrate its existing data systems with Snowflake’s Data Cloud. It uses Snowflake as its source of truth to power regulatory reporting, and then sends data to other systems to build and train machine learning models used in fraud detection and Know Your Customer checks.

The relationship between Solaris and Snowflake is proving to be a perfect match. “The Data Cloud meets all our data principles and requirements,” added Ben David. “And the team at Snowflake is closely aligned with our philosophy: solving problems quickly today, while keeping an eye on the problems you need to solve tomorrow.”

With 70 data sources, hundreds of reports and thousands of lines of code to move, Ben David anticipated a complex migration: “But honestly, I was surprised by how quick it’s been. We made the move in record time.”

Thanks to a flexible training and support package from Snowflake, Solaris was up and running on Snowflake in just nine months.

“Our support contacts at Snowflake have been brilliant since day one and really made us feel like we were in safe hands,” said Ben David. “They’ve shared success stories from other businesses to help us understand best practices and were flexible about how we used our time with the Professional Services team. We were able to sort out the basics ourselves, then bring their experts in to help us optimize the platform at a deeper level as the project progressed.”

Ben David estimates that only 5-10% of Solaris employees had access to data in the past, so many were reliant on the data team for reporting. Now, 30% of the organization has access to Snowflake and are regularly using the platform thanks to an approach that decentralizes data access and control to empower individual Solaris domains. “That’s been really big for us,” he added. “It’s all part of our push to become a truly data-driven company.”

Since getting its teams up to speed on Snowflake, Ben David has seen many benefits for Solaris.

“I was really pleased with how easy it was to integrate Snowflake with our existing systems,” he said. “Snowflake is integrated with our existing cloud provider, so it only took a few minutes to connect Snowflake as a source, build the pipelines, clean the data and start running models.”

And because multiple businesses within Solaris Group are using Snowflake, internal data sharing has also been seamless. “Everything just works, and that’s given us space to think about how we can further optimize performance and balance costs.”

Those performance boosts have also added up to transform time to delivery. “Our dev time has changed dramatically,” said Ben David. “I’m pleased to say we’re no longer the bottleneck. Data is now available, it’s ready before everybody starts in the morning, and we’ve closed our backlog. In short, data gets to whoever needs it, when they need it, and we’re now open for innovation.”

Having accelerated the speed of development, data delivery, integration and innovation at Solaris, Ben David already has plans for how to get even more out of Snowflake. He and his team are particularly interested in integrating tools such as Streamlit to build new data apps.

But whatever Solaris does next, the plan is to expand its data core built on Snowflake. And while, for now, that core primarily serves internal teams, everyone will benefit from Solaris’ new data ecosystem over time.

“We’ve done a lot of work with Snowflake to build amazing foundations and better understand our products and business,” explained Ben David. “The next step is helping share this insight with our partners so they can get the benefits—and then share those benefits with their customers as well.”