Fresha Delivers a Safer, Richer Data Platform for its Partners Through Snowflake

Whether it’s working with a single-person salon or a large enterprise with multiple locations, Fresha offers an intuitive, multi-purpose platform. And with the breadth of its service offering comes data — lots of it. 

Internal teams at Fresha use data from production databases and third-party marketing and finance platforms to make data-driven decisions across sales, marketing and account management. The company now also offers extensive data to its wellness partners in the form of Fresha Insights.

“Giving the power of data to business owners (often for the first time) is really important for us; it’s one of our biggest competitive edges,” says Jack Doherty, VP of Analytics at Fresha. “We help them see demand and growth opportunities that they couldn’t identify without a strategic view of how their own business is performing.”

Powered by the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, Fresha Insights offers wellness partners a huge breadth of data through a clean, intuitive user interface. Whether they want to see team occupancy rates, busy periods each month or their tax burden for the quarter, they can get that information in seconds. The data is updated throughout the day, so partners can make informed decisions using accurate and timely information.

Like any platform that powers payments, Fresha has to be ready to detect and block fraudulent activity. Manually identifying bad actors is seldom straightforward, and it’s even more challenging for a platform like Fresha where businesses of all shapes and sizes transact.

“There are stolen cards to worry about, and people creating fake businesses or hijacking existing accounts to launder money. People are very creative when it comes to fraud,” explains Doherty. Fresha has great fraud analysts, but the company needed more tools to combat fraud as it grew. So, it brought in data scientists to accelerate and improve detection across a broad range of fraud vectors. 

Pulling from a range of fraud signals, Fresha automatically checks transactions to identify suspicious items and move them to a separate queue for manual review. By refreshing transaction data regularly within Snowflake, Fresha’s machine learning models can act quickly to identify and stop fraud on the platform. When it first started running this new ML approach, the company was able to reduce fraud on the platform by 80%.

From dashboards to fraud detection, everything Fresha is doing with its data is only possible thanks to low latency access to production databases – a capability that wasn’t always in place.  “With our previous infrastructure, we could only refresh data every couple of hours,” recalls Emiliano Mancuso, Head of Infrastructure and Data Engineering at Fresha. 

In the early days, there were also cost concerns around Fresha’s data estate. “We were spending around five figures a month just ingesting data from PostgreSQL into Snowflake,” says Mancuso. “Since we started using Snowpipe, we’ve cut those costs by around 95% while ingesting more data than ever before.” 

Beyond lower costs, there’s also a lower operational burden on Fresha’s data and infrastructure teams. As a SaaS platform, Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud can easily scale to meet Fresha’s needs. “Everything just works with Snowflake, and it’s easy for it to scale to support our growing traffic, transaction volumes and vision for the business,” explains Mancuso.

With Snowflake at its side, Fresha is able to bring fresh insights to wellness businesses of all shapes and sizes — and it has plans to use more Snowflake features in the future to provide its partners with greater data access.

Today, Fresha offers insights through its Fresha Insights Portal. Going forward, it has plans to start sharing data in new ways using Snowflake’s Collaboration features. It’s also looking to offer new features to help partners with forecasting, automating tasks and integrations, and using AI to find opportunities and optimisations across their businesses. 

Whatever Fresha looks to next, its data teams are confident they have the right platform powering their vision. “Snowflake has so many features and SQL compatibility makes it so easy to use,” says Mancuso. “It provides such a wide range of options depending on your ambitions or the problem you’re trying to solve, and there’s a lot of benefit in the simplicity of orchestration. Everything about the product is great.”