How Toyota Financial Services Optimizes Performance and Cost with Snowflake

Snowflake’s fully managed platform helps minimize TCO by achieving faster time to insights and production, decreasing unplanned downtime and operational risks, and reducing business costs through customers paying only for actual usage. Snowflake also eliminates software license fees and recovers storage and server costs. Additionally, Snowflake reduces infrastructure costs, administrative efforts and maintenance so you can reallocate technology resources to higher-value business priorities.

Snowflake’s native performance features and continuous platform improvements help you achieve fast, stable and more efficient workloads. Customers automatically benefit from performance enhancements in query times and query processing as they roll out and experience faster and more efficient querying with transparent platform optimizations. Snowflake enables you to scale out compute resources with simple virtual warehouse sizing and accelerates workloads with serverless services.

Finally, Snowflake’s native cost optimization features help you better understand, monitor and predict your Snowflake spend. With Snowflake, you can enact controls to limit and manage spend and optimize cost management by identifying and reducing inefficient spend.

Here’s how Toyota Financial Services reduced TCO, optimized performance and costs, and accelerated product innovation with Snowflake. 

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) provides financing, retail leasing and other financial services to authorized Toyota dealers, affiliates and customers. The company’s legacy data platform had grown too complex and convoluted over the years, with a lot of manual processes that made it slow and hard to manage. 

The infrastructure was difficult to scale, and core analytic and data applications sat on on-premises servers, creating bottlenecks and stifling innovation. Things were further complicated by the large number of compliance requirements TFS needs to follow, especially around financial data and SOX requirements.

The company sought to modernize its data platform and move toward more of a self-serve model—one in which, for example, business users could set up their own data pipelines without relying on the engineering team. And so TFS looked to Snowflake to serve as a core part of this new data platform, which it called EDP 2.0. 

Previously, the lead time to make any infrastructure updates was close to three months. Migrating to the Snowflake Data Cloud took the burden of infrastructure maintenance off the engineering team’s shoulders completely, offering TFS instant scalability and near-zero maintenance. The company has pushed most of its data processing into its Snowflake environment, so Snowflake does the heavy lifting, and Snowflake’s SQL-first approach removes the need for external data transformations. In addition, TFS’ vendors also use Snowflake, so instead of sending data via managed file transfers, the data required for the company’s daily operations is shared directly.

Today, TFS has substantially decreased its infrastructure footprint, saving time, money and headaches. And it’s ready to drive into the future with a fully modernized data platform that hums as smoothly as a finely tuned engine.

To ensure our customers are successful when using Snowflake, we continually strive to provide optimal performance at the best price. For more information on how you can minimize TCO and improve price for performance with Snowflake, visit Snowflake Cost & Performance Optimization.