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Hong Kong’s Neat Ties up With Sequoia-Backed Snowflake for Enhanced Data Insights

Neat, a Hong Kong-based financial technology startup, announced its partnership with Snowflake, a cloud data platform.

Under the new partnership, Neat will utilise Snowflake’s cloud data platform to integrate their data into a single source for data harmonisation, enabling business teams to leverage data insights.

Neat is best known as a payment solutions provider, serves SMEs in Asia and Europe by offering access to financial tools such as foreign exchange, online account opening, and corporate cards for fast and efficient international and multi-currency transactions.

To enhance customer experience, and as a digital only company, Neat adopted Snowflake’s cloud data platform to integrate its data in a reliable and secure environment. With centralised data, the company said it can now derive insights quicker which helps the business in making data-driven choices.

Giorgio Galvan

“One of our main challenges as a team was data gathering. With a number of tools and data sources across various platforms, our team spent a significant amount of time gathering and analysing siloed and raw data. Moreover, the COVID-19 situation accelerated the movement of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to go online. To support our growing customer base, we needed to give our data analytics a boost for improved decision making,”

said Giorgio Galvan, Data Lead at Neat.

Neat previously relied on an in-house IT system built upon a siloed database while working with various external software vendors. By partnering with Snowflake, the Visa-funded fintech is now able to integrate its data and leverage assets for business growth. As a next step, Neat is looking to operationalise machine learning models with Snowflake and build its own applications as data scales and business expands.

“We are seeing a tremendous improvement in terms of turning data into insights. The time spent on data gathering has been significantly reduced which gave us more time to focus on value-added work. This has resulted in improved productivity and better customer experience,”

added Galvan.

Geoff Soon

“Neat offers valuable alternative digital tools and products for start-ups and SMBs to thrive under the new economy. With Snowflake’s cloud data platform, we are able to support Neat with their mission to build a dynamic and frictionless business environment for entrepreneurs through technology,”

said Geoff Soon, Snowflake’s Managing Director for South Asia.

Following their IPO at the their New York Stock Exchange few days back, Snowflake which is backed by billionaire Warren Buffett, has more than doubled their stocks.

Featured Image: Neat