FinTech platform Affirm harnesses Snowflake’s interoperable storage

The margin for error in financial technology is razor thin, a fact of which Affirm Inc. is well aware. That’s why the company has relied on Snowflake Inc.’s Open Catalog offering, alongside Apache Iceberg. The Iceberg format has already allowed Affirm to shorten its audit windows from months or weeks to minutes.

Affirm’s Ankit Singh (left) and Snowflake’s Russell Spitzer (one from left) discuss storage on Apache Iceberg.

“Iceberg is our backbone for all financial pipelines,” said Ankit Singh (pictured, left), senior staff software engineer at Affirm. “As a financial company, we have strict obligations not just to our users, but also to our banking partners. Iceberg provides us this unique data lake opportunity where we can aggregate the view of all the transactions we do with our users, all the interactions our users have with our financial systems, and essentially time travel to a point where we can rebuild our understanding of how money movement happens.”

Singh and Russell Spitzer (pictured, right), principal software engineer at Snowflake and Apache Polaris (Incubating) PPMC, spoke with theCUBE’s Rebecca Knight and George Gilbert at Snowflake Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the power of interoperable storage. (* Disclosure below.)

How Iceberg shapes Affirm’s data management

Affirm initially stores its data sets in externally managed Apache Iceberg tables. Then, for internal analysis, the company stores sets in Snowflake-managed tables while utilizing the Snowflake compute engine. This federation between the Snowflake and open catalogs allows users to read and write data anywhere.

“We have a lot of users whose Snowflake is not their only engine,” Spitzer explained. “And we want to make sure that they get the same experience regardless of where they’re coming from. When I think about Polaris, it’s about how do we take all those great governance features that only exist in Snowflake and make them available to everyone.”

In the future, Snowflake looks to enable “fine-grain access control” so that users can, for example, have access to specific rows of data rather than the whole table. The company is also interested in streaming data and AI use cases. Snowflake’s interoperable storage has already saved Singh time and worry.

“When it comes to money movement, you cannot make mistakes,” he said. “You can be slow but never wrong. That has essentially allowed me to sleep at night — [when] trying to fix quality issues, it auto corrects itself, and if there is an issue, we can remediate, and we can be slow. That’s been the biggest ‘aha’ moment … with Iceberg as our ability to branch and audit.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Snowflake Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Snowflake Summit. Neither Snowflake Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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