Enhanced Spreadsheet Interface Drives Collaboration
Sigma Computing, an innovator in cloud analytics and business intelligence, has provided Cowen Inc. (“Cowen”), a leading financial services firm, with a platform where business teams, analysts and IT can collaborate on data validation, exploration and analyses via a user-friendly spreadsheet interface. Since deploying Sigma, Cowen has gained a holistic view into the firm’s five billion rows of data, the finance team is creating reports six times faster and alignment across the finance, operations and compliance teams has greatly improved.
“Sigma checked all the boxes for us. Not only did it seamlessly connect to Snowflake, our current cloud provider, but it also has an interface similar to Excel that our business teams felt comfortable with”
“Sigma checked all the boxes for us. Not only did it seamlessly connect to Snowflake, our current cloud provider, but it also has an interface similar to Excel that our business teams felt comfortable with,” said Ross Levin, Managing Director, Global Clearing, Settlement & Securities Finance, Cowen. “Layering Sigma on top of Snowflake has given us enhanced visibility into our business, streamlined operations and improved efficiencies across all of our teams.”
As a diversified financial services firm with millions of trades each day, Cowen is responsible for storing each individual transaction and providing timely responses to regulatory requests. Prior to implementing Sigma, the compliance team had to submit requests to IT, which would then be fulfilled via multiple Excel worksheets because the datasets were too large to fit into a single worksheet. This made it difficult to get a holistic view of the data, increased the possibility of formula errors and made responding to regulatory requests time-consuming and labor-intensive. The direct, governed access to all of the firm’s live data that Sigma provides and the ability to drill down into row-level data has dramatically eased the pressure of meeting strict regulatory requirements for Cowen.
“I love hearing success stories like Cowen’s, where Sigma has put data directly into the hands of the teams that need it most, streamlined workflows and given people some much-needed time back in their days,” said Mike Palmer, CEO, Sigma Computing. “While Sigma is industry-agnostic and would be a benefit to any company with cloud data, Financial Services is the first industry that comes to mind that absolutely needs Sigma. There is no other solution on the market that can handle billions of rows of data, provide visibility into individual transactions and satisfies the fine-grained control financial services require – all at cloud speed and via a spreadsheet interface that anyone can use.”
Read the complete Cowen case study or join Levin, along with experts from Sigma and Snowflake, at the “Data on the Rocks: Driving Productivity with Self-service Analytics for Financial Services” webinar on May 13, 2021, to learn about additional outcomes the company has achieved since implementing a self-service analytics program for business teams.
Sigma recently announced that the company has completed a comprehensive TruSight assessment, the industry standard established by leading financial services companies. The decision to undergo the assessment demonstrates the company’s commitment to meeting data security industry control standards and providing transparency into its control environment, ensuring that customers can be confident when selecting Sigma.
