Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, announced that LB Finance PLC, one of Sri Lanka’s A- (lka) Fitch-rated non-bank financial institutions, has adopted Snowflake as the data foundation to accelerate its digital transformation journey. By modernizing and unifying its data ecosystem on the Snowflake platform, LB Finance has evolved its hybrid business model to offer a seamless experience for modern app and digital-first customers as they transition from physical branches to accessing financial services digitally.

As digital adoption expanded, LB Finance identified opportunities to enhance its on-premises data architecture to better support real-time analytics, AI workloads, and the increasing performance demands of its digital channels. The tightly coupled nature of compute and storage limited scalability and delayed access to timely insights, increasing reliance on IT teams for analytics. Scaling compute-intensive AI infrastructure also became increasingly complex and costly, highlighting the need for a modern, cloud-native platform.

In response to these evolving requirements, LB Finance selected Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud platform for its security, governance, and scalability, establishing a unified and future-ready data foundation. This approach has enabled the organization to operate as a real-time, insight-driven financial services provider, supporting AI-powered personalization and improved digital customer experiences.

Snowflake now serves as LB Finance’s single source of truth, providing enterprise-grade security, governance, and scalability across its data ecosystem. Altria Consulting, the implementation partner, helped LB Finance transition to Snowflake to run a broad range of workloads on a single, unified platform and eliminate silos between reporting, analytics, and AI. Today, the company’s enterprise data warehousing, regulatory reporting, digital channel analytics, customer 360 insights, and production AI models for credit risk, fraud detection, and personalization are powered by Snowflake. These capabilities have delivered measurable business impact. Data availability has shifted from batch-oriented processing to near real-time. Report generation time has dropped from hours to seconds during peak periods, and business users now access self-service insights without IT intervention. At the customer level, this translates into faster loan approvals, fully digital onboarding journeys, personalized product offerings, and credit decisions delivered significantly faster, in many cases within minutes.

Using Snowflake ML, the institution has deployed live AI-driven customer scoring models for gold loans, improving credit risk assessment and speeding up lending decisions. Snowflake’s Document AI has automated document-intensive personal lending workflows, enabling near-instant credit decisions via the LB CIM app; while GenAI-powered credit approval assistants, built on Snowflake Cortex and Streamlit, now help credit officers make faster, more accurate decisions.

Snowflake provides the foundation for these innovations with enterprise-grade security, governance, and auditability features built into the platform by design, allowing LB Finance to innovate confidently, while supporting robust regulatory requirements in financial services.

“Snowflake has significantly strengthened our data foundation at LB Finance, enabling us to operate with greater speed, scalability, and governance in a fast-evolving financial services environment. With a unified, AI-ready platform, we are enhancing real-time insights, improving credit decisioning and fraud detection, and delivering more personalized digital financial services—while maintaining strong regulatory compliance and risk controls,” said Chethana Kahandugoda, Chief Information Officer, LB Finance PLC.

“LB Finance demonstrates how the AI Data Cloud transforms regulated industries, from reporting to intelligence to action. Snowflake’s unified platform is enabling LB Finance to operationalize AI at scale, unlock predictive insights, accelerate decision-making, boost operational efficiency, and evolve how they engage with customers, while innovating securely to drive business transformation,” said Vijayant Rai, Managing Director – India, Snowflake.

Looking ahead, LB Finance aims to build "AI-Ready Digital Finance" to advance from descriptive to predictive intelligence, deploy real-time fraud insights, and deliver unique, context-aware financial advice and product offers to customers in real time, while operating within defined risk and compliance boundaries.