Snowflake for Broker-Dealers. One Warehouse for the Whole Enterprise.

Broker-dealer data infrastructure reflects the organizational complexity of the BD itself. Home office systems track enterprise-level metrics. OSJs monitor their advisor groups. Individual advisors see their own books. In most BD organizations, these layers are served by separate systems with no coherent data link between them. Snowflake provides that link — a warehouse that stores everything and shares it appropriately with every level of the organization.

For the broader landscape of how Snowflake is reshaping data infrastructure across wealth management, see our Snowflake for Financial Services overview.

BDs Have Three Data Problems Snowflake Solves

Independent broker-dealers and aggregator BDs share a common set of data challenges that emerge directly from their organizational structure. These are not technology problems. They are structural problems that technology — specifically Snowflake's architecture — is uniquely positioned to address.

Problem 1: Home Office, OSJ, and Advisor Data in Separate Silos

Home office leadership needs enterprise-wide metrics: total AUM, revenue by advisor group, compliance status across the network, and growth analytics. OSJs need metrics for their affiliated advisor groups. Individual advisors need their own book-level data. In the typical BD technology stack, each of these audiences uses a different system — often without any automated data flow between them. Home office runs its analytics on custodian aggregates. OSJs use the BD's reporting portal. Advisors use their own portfolio reporting tools. None of these views is consistent or timely.

Snowflake solves this by creating a single warehouse that holds all three levels of data simultaneously, with role-based access controls that determine what each user or system can query. Home office users see everything. OSJ administrators see their affiliated advisors. Individual advisors see only their own accounts. Same data source, different views — no reconciliation required between levels.

Problem 2: Secure Advisor-Level Data Sharing Across Organizational Boundaries

BDs frequently need to share data with advisors who operate as independent entities — not employees of the BD, but affiliates with their own technology stacks, compliance programs, and analytics needs. Getting data to these advisors traditionally means CSV exports, portal logins to a BD-hosted system, or custom report packages assembled by the BD's back office. All of these approaches create data copies that diverge from the source immediately upon delivery.

Snowflake's secure data sharing eliminates the data copy problem entirely. The BD creates a curated share of each advisor's relevant data — positions, transactions, performance, billing — and makes it accessible in the advisor's own Snowflake account. The advisor queries live BD data directly, without CSV latency or version divergence. The BD maintains the single source of truth and grants access; the advisor gets real analytical capability without the BD losing data control.

Problem 3: Regulatory Rollups Across the Full Network

FINRA, SEC, and state regulators require BDs to maintain accurate records across the entire network of affiliated advisors and client accounts. Net capital calculations, 15c3-3 custody computations, CAT reporting, and supervision documentation all require aggregating data from every advisor relationship into enterprise-level computations. When that data is distributed across advisor-operated systems with no central warehouse, regulatory rollups become manual exercises — expensive, error-prone, and impossible to automate.

Snowflake's enterprise data warehouse makes regulatory rollup queries straightforward. All advisor and account data lives in the same warehouse. Rollup queries aggregate it in seconds. Audit logs document the data lineage for regulatory examinations. Compliance teams shift from manually assembling regulatory reports to reviewing automated outputs — a far more scalable model as the BD grows its advisor network.

What a BD Snowflake Footprint Looks Like

A BD Snowflake deployment is structured around the organizational hierarchy of the firm. Understanding that structure clarifies what data lives where, who can query it, and how Snowflake data sharing works across organizational boundaries.

The Enterprise Data Warehouse

The BD's Snowflake account holds the master dataset: all custodian position and transaction data across the entire advisor network, all advisor and account metadata, all billing and compensation records, and all compliance monitoring data. This is the single source of truth. Home office users, compliance teams, and enterprise analytics queries all run against this warehouse. No individual team or system can modify the underlying data — they can only read from it through role-gated access controls.

OSJ-Level Data Sharing

OSJs receive Snowflake shares scoped to their affiliated advisor group. An OSJ administrator's share includes all accounts, positions, transactions, and compliance data for advisors under their supervision — and nothing from advisors outside their supervision hierarchy. When the BD updates its master warehouse, OSJ shares reflect the update immediately. There is no separate OSJ database to maintain and reconcile.

Advisor-Level Data Sharing

Individual advisor shares are scoped to that advisor's own clients and accounts only. Analytically sophisticated advisors can connect BI tools like Tableau, Sigma, or Power BI directly to their Snowflake share — building their own dashboards and analytics from live BD data without requesting exports from the home office. See also our guide to data platforms for broker-dealers for more on advisor-level analytics architecture.

Integration Sources

The BD's Snowflake warehouse receives data from multiple sources: custodians (Pershing, Schwab, Fidelity, National Financial, RBC Correspondent, and others), the BD's back-office system, compliance platforms, advisor CRM systems, and compensation management tools. Pre-built connectors normalize each source into the BD's unified schema. New data sources are added by deploying a new connector — not by building custom integration logic from scratch.

Compliance and Supervision on Snowflake

For broker-dealers, compliance is not a back-office function — it is an existential requirement. FINRA Rule 3110 requires systematic supervision of all advisors' activities. SEC regulations require accurate books and records across the full enterprise. State insurance and securities regulations add additional layers of documentation and monitoring requirements. The question is not whether to comply, but how efficiently and accurately the BD can do so as it scales.

Automated Transaction Supervision

Snowflake enables transaction-level supervision at enterprise scale. A scheduled query runs daily against the full transaction dataset, applying configurable supervision rules: flagging transactions in securities on the restricted list, identifying accounts with unusual turnover ratios, detecting patterns consistent with churning or unauthorized trading, and surfacing advisors with activity profiles that deviate significantly from their peer group. Flagged items route automatically to the appropriate compliance team level for review.

Suitability and Best-Interest Monitoring

Regulation Best Interest requires BDs to document that each investment recommendation is in the client's best interest given their specific profile. Snowflake enables automated suitability monitoring by joining position and transaction data with client risk profile data — flagging accounts where holdings appear inconsistent with stated investment objectives, risk tolerance, or time horizon. Continuous monitoring catches potential issues far earlier than periodic manual review.

Regulatory Reporting and Documentation

Net capital calculations, customer protection rule computations, CAT reporting, and Form BD amendment tracking all require accurate, complete enterprise data. Snowflake's unified warehouse makes these calculations queries rather than manual assembly exercises. Scheduled SQL jobs compute the required figures on regulatory deadlines, with full data lineage documentation to support examiner review. Audit trails are maintained automatically — Snowflake's query history and access logs provide the documentation fabric regulators expect.

How Aggregator BDs Use Data Sharing

Aggregator and roll-up broker-dealers — firms that expand by acquiring or affiliating with independent advisor practices — have a specific data challenge that Snowflake's data sharing capability addresses directly: how to give each affiliated practice meaningful data access without creating a fragmented collection of isolated data environments that the home office cannot see across.

Preserving the Single Source of Truth During Growth

When an aggregator BD affiliates with a new advisory practice, the practice's client and account data needs to flow into the enterprise warehouse. At the same time, the practice needs to see its own data without seeing other affiliated practices' data. Snowflake's multi-tenant data architecture with row-level security handles both requirements simultaneously: the enterprise warehouse ingests all practice data, and each practice receives a share scoped to its own accounts only.

The result is a BD that can scale its advisor network without scaling its data complexity linearly. The 50th affiliated practice looks exactly like the first from a data architecture perspective — it gets a share, its data goes into the warehouse, and compliance monitoring extends to cover it automatically. The data architecture does not require redesign as the BD grows.

Competitive Differentiation Through Data Access

Sophisticated advisors evaluate BD affiliation decisions partly on what data and analytics capabilities the BD provides. An aggregator BD that can offer Snowflake data sharing — direct analytical access to live, clean, structured account data — offers a meaningful differentiation from BDs that provide only portal-based reporting. This is an increasingly important recruitment and retention factor for high-AUM practices with data-sophisticated operations teams. See also: Snowflake for RIAs for the advisor-side perspective on this value proposition.

Snowflake for BDs vs. Home Office BI Tools

Many BDs rely on home office BI tools — custom reporting platforms, embedded reporting in back-office systems, or licensed reporting portals — to provide analytics across the advisor network. These tools serve important reporting functions but were not designed as enterprise data warehouses. The comparison below clarifies where Snowflake fills the gap these tools leave.

Home office BI tools and Snowflake are not mutually exclusive. Many BDs use existing reporting portals for advisor-facing report delivery while running Snowflake underneath as the enterprise data layer that feeds those portals. Snowflake's role is not to replace the reporting layer — it is to become the authoritative, queryable data foundation that every system in the BD's stack draws from.

Where Milemarker Fits

Milemarker is a Snowflake-native platform purpose-built for wealth management firms — including broker-dealers operating at enterprise scale. For BDs, Milemarker provides the integration connectors, data model, and pipeline infrastructure that make a BD Snowflake deployment production-ready without a multi-year engineering build.

BD-Specific Integration Library

Milemarker's 130+ integration library covers the full BD ecosystem: clearing firms and custodians (Pershing, National Financial, Schwab, Fidelity, RBC Correspondent, and others), BD back-office systems, compliance platforms, advisor CRM systems, and compensation management tools. Each integration is pre-built, maintained by Milemarker, and updated when source systems change their formats — the BD's engineering team does not carry that maintenance burden.

Multi-Tier Data Architecture

Milemarker's BD data model includes the multi-tier organizational structure that BD data requires: enterprise-level, OSJ-level, and advisor-level data isolation with role-based access controls built in. Snowflake data shares for OSJs and advisors are configured through the Milemarker platform — not custom-engineered for each affiliation. As the BD adds new OSJ relationships or affiliates new advisor practices, the data architecture scales without redesign.

Augments, Never Replaces

Milemarker's philosophy for BD deployments is the same as for all wealth management clients: augment what exists, build what is missing, never require you to rip out systems that work. If the BD already has a Snowflake account with some pipelines built, Milemarker extends it. If the BD is starting from zero, Milemarker builds the full infrastructure. The outcome is a Snowflake warehouse the BD owns, controls, and can extend independently — The Infrastructure for Wealth built on infrastructure the firm fully controls.

For related reading on how wealth management firms structure data infrastructure across organizational complexity, see our wealth management data lakehouse guide and our overview of wealth management data platforms.

Frequently Asked Questions