Snowflake debuts Cortex AI to unify data for financial services
Snowflake has introduced Cortex AI for Financial Services, aiming to provide financial institutions with the ability to unify data ecosystems and deploy AI models, applications, and agents on AI-ready data.
The comprehensive suite comprises a managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, designed to securely integrate proprietary and third-party data within Snowflake from partners including FactSet, MSCI, Nasdaq eVestment, and The Associated Press. Enterprises can access this data in various external applications and agent platforms, such as Anthropic, CrewAI, Cursor, Devin by Cognition, Salesforce's Agentforce, and Windsurf, to support the rapid development of context-rich AI solutions.
Baris Gultekin, Vice President of AI at Snowflake, highlighted challenges faced by the financial services industry, stating, "The financial services industry has long been a leader in embracing new technology, and AI is no exception. However, the industry faces unique challenges in navigating fragmented data, robust compliance requirements, and the need for airtight security and governance. By bringing AI directly to where their data already lives and enabling secure interoperability with remote agents, Snowflake is making it easier for highly-regulated industries like financial services to power business-critical use cases and tap into a unified ecosystem of best-of-breed data, AI, and apps."
Cortex AI capabilities
Cortex AI for Financial Services is intended to support complex financial workflows, including market analysis, quantitative research, fraud detection, customer support, and claims management. Snowflake's Data Science Agent automates processes such as data cleaning, feature engineering, model prototyping, and validation. This functionality enables technical teams to move quickly from raw data to production-ready models, with use cases spanning quantitative research, fraud detection, customer 360, and underwriting workflows.
The solution also addresses unstructured data analysis. With Cortex AISQL, users can extract insights from documents, audio, and images efficiently, supporting workflows in customer service, investment analytics, claims management, and next-best action initiatives. For business users, Snowflake Intelligence-currently in public preview-provides a natural language interface for querying structured and unstructured data, further extending access to data insights across financial institutions.
Third-party data and integration
Cortex AI for Financial Services allows firms to integrate trusted data from structured data providers-such as CB Insights, Cotality, Deutsche Börse, MSCI, and Nasdaq eVestment-using the forthcoming Sharing of Semantic Views feature, and from unstructured data publishers like FactSet, Investopedia, The Associated Press, and The Washington Post via Cortex Knowledge Extensions, now generally available. This approach is intended to help institutions combine their proprietary data with industry data for improved insight and accuracy.
MCP Server and interoperability
The managed MCP Server offers industry-wide interoperability for AI agent connectivity. The server transfers data-including both structured and unstructured types-to external AI agents in a standardised manner, reducing the need for custom integrations and speeding up AI application delivery. Companies can share data with remote agents and utilise Snowflake's ecosystem of apps and third-party data securely, addressing security and governance requirements.
The MCP Server can be used with a variety of platforms, such as Anthropic, Augment Code, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, CrewAI, Cursor, Devin by Cognition, Glean, Kumo, Mistral, Salesforce's Agentforce, UiPath, Windsurf, Workday, and WRITER, supporting broader ecosystem interoperability.
Industry views
"Enterprises are moving from AI pilots to production, but until now, securely connecting AI to proprietary data has been a critical barrier," said Jonathan Pelosi, Head of Industry, Financial Services, Anthropic. "Our partnership with Snowflake helps solve this by using MCP to connect each organisation's governed data directly to Claude. Customers can now use Claude's advanced reasoning on both structured analytics and unstructured documents via Cortex Analyst and Cortex Search, while maintaining enterprise security standards. With Claude and Snowflake, our joint customers are turning proprietary data into competitive advantage."
João Moura, Co-Founder and CEO of CrewAI, commented, "The next wave of enterprise AI hinges upon orchestrating collaborative crews of specialised agents to automate complex processes. For these agentic workflows to succeed in the enterprise, they must be grounded in secure, high-quality data. Snowflake's launch of a managed MCP Server provides the essential, secure pipeline for our agent crews to access, analyse, and act upon governed data within the AI Data Cloud. For our joint customers, this partnership moves multi-agent systems from a theoretical concept to a practical, enterprise-ready reality, and we are thrilled to be a launch partner."
Ricky Doar, Head of Field Engineering at Cursor, said, "The intelligence of any AI coding assistant is fundamentally defined by the context it can access. A managed MCP server like Snowflake's is a rich live data environment for tools like Cursor to consume essential data context and write faster, more accurate, and more secure production-ready code."
John Costigan, Executive Vice President and Chief Data Officer at FactSet, stated, "As a leading market data provider, we are proud to be on the cutting-edge of industry-wide advances like MCP. Providing our clients access to AI-ready data products represents a significant step forward for our clients, providing the technological foundation to unify and enrich data within modern cloud environments. This collaboration underscores FactSet's commitment to equipping financial institutions with the tools necessary to navigate evolving markets, manage risk more effectively, and foster enduring value creation."
Ian Macomber, Head of Analytics at Ramp, added, "At Ramp, our mission is to help businesses save time and money. A critical part of that is deeply understanding their needs from the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive. With Snowflake Cortex AI, we can securely tap into and analyse our unstructured customer data, allowing teams across Ramp to ask questions in plain English and get instant answers. Snowflake makes it easy to democratise data-driven decision-making, which enables us to innovate faster and build the best possible platform for our customers."
Gary Lerhaupt, Vice President of Product Architecture at Agentforce at Salesforce, said, "We're excited to expand our partnership with Snowflake to deliver agent interoperability through protocols like MCP. This will enable deeper cross-platform connectivity and power more intelligent agentic experiences within Agentforce. Customers will easily be able to discover and connect to Snowflake's MCP server directly within Salesforce AgentExchange, accelerating the development and deployment of AI agents."
