Why Lloyd’s List Intelligence is Bringing Maritime Data to the Snowflake Marketplace: In conversation with Hari Ganapathy
The Snowflake Marketplace is becoming an increasingly important way for organizations to discover, test and use third-party data directly inside the platforms where their teams already work.
Instead of building pipelines, managing FTP transfers, or maintaining nightly jobs, a Snowflake customer can discover a dataset and start querying it directly inside their own cloud environment–live, governed and ready to combine with the data they already hold.
For maritime, trade, insurance, compliance and risk teams, that matters. The value of intelligence is not just in the quality of the data itself, but in how quickly it can be accessed, combined with internal information, and turned into decisions.
That is why Lloyd’s List Intelligence has made selected maritime intelligence datasets available on the Snowflake Marketplace. Our customers can now explore vessel movement, ownership, risk and situational datasets in Snowflake without having to build traditional data pipelines or manage cumbersome file transfers.
To unpack what is available, how it works, and what it means for our customers, we sat down with our Director of Partnerships, Hari Ganapathy.
Let's start at the top. Why did Lloyd's List Intelligence want to be on the Snowflake Marketplace?
This all came down to listening to our customers. More and more of them have standardised on Snowflake as their data platform, and they were effectively telling us, "We trust your data — we just want it to show up where we already work, without a six-week integration project every time." The intelligence has always been there. The friction was getting it into their hands even more quickly. Snowflake takes a lot of that friction away, so it was a fairly easy decision in the end. We go to the customer rather than asking the customer to come to us.
For people who don't know us well, what is Lloyd's List Intelligence, and why should they trust the data?
Lloyd’s List Intelligence is the authority in maritime intelligence, delivering the trusted maritime data, analytics, and insights that keep global trade moving. We've been doing this since 1734, which I say not to brag about our age but because trust in this industry is genuinely earned over decades if not centuries. The maritime world runs on it. What we do is pull together a global AIS network, satellite data, classification societies, registries, P&I clubs, port authorities, and–crucially–the human expertise of the Lloyd's Agency Network, and turn all of that into the clearest possible picture of where vessels are, who owns them, and what risk they carry. Being on Snowflake doesn't change any of that. It just changes how quickly you can put it to work.
What data can customers actually get through the Marketplace?
We have three listings live right now, and they're all free to access with representative samples. We'd rather you get your hands on real data and see how it behaves than take our word for it.
The foundation is AIS SeaOrbis. That's our AIS vessel-tracking dataset–real-time positions and movement insights on more than 550,000 vessels worldwide. What sets it apart from a raw AIS feed is how it's built: we combine terrestrial, shipborne, satellite and human intelligence over our global geospatial database, and our own proprietary terrestrial network — staffed and maintained by us across 12,000-plus ports through the Lloyd's Agency Network—delivers more than 73% of those positions. You're not just getting dots on a map; you're getting historic, current and predicted vessel movement you can plan around.
Then there are two solution datasets that show what happens when you put SeaOrbis alongside our wider maritime intelligence. Insights into the Strait of Hormuz and US-Iran Conflict is a good example–it's a multi-layered view of vessel activity around the Strait and the Persian Gulf, combining AIS positions with vessel characteristics, ownership, geospatial intelligence, voyage events and risk context. It's built for exactly the kind of moment we're in: rerouting, congestion, counterparty and sanctions risk, cargo exposure–a fast-moving risk environment where you need to understand not just where vessels are, but who's behind them and what it means.
The third is our Shadow Fleet Ownership & AIS Trial Dataset. This enables visibility into ownership , core vessel characteristics and a recent sample of SeaOrbis AIS activity, focused on shadow-fleet vessels. It's there so teams can join ownership structures, flag and vessel attributes and recent movement together inside Snowflake, and see for themselves how it supports sanctions-evasion monitoring, compliance review, investigations and trade-risk work–before committing to anything.
The real point, however, isn't the list of datasets. It's that you can access LLI intelligence with your own data inside Snowflake and move from "where is this vessel" to "who's really behind it, and should I be worried." And these three are just a starting point — we aim to build on what's on the Marketplace over time.
How is getting the data through Snowflake different from a traditional data integration?
It takes out a whole layer of engineering and waiting. There's no ingestion overhead–no pipelines to build, no nightly jobs to babysit, no maintenance to own. The data just shows up in your environment, which means a lot less dependency on IT and a lot less operational risk.
The way I describe it to people is: think about sharing a document in the cloud. When you share it, you're not emailing a copy back and forth — the other person just sees your live version, and when you update it, they see the update. It's the same idea here. We share live access to our underlying data tables, and you're querying the most current maritime data in place. We update it, you see it instantly. Nothing has to be copied and shipped over to you.
How fast can a customer realistically start getting value?
In minutes. That's the part people are sometimes skeptical about until they see it. Because the data is already in your environment, an analyst can start querying and testing almost straight away. There's no infrastructure to stand up first and no long onboarding cycle, so the gap between "we'd like to try this" and "we're getting answers" closes dramatically.
Do customers need data engineers or API expertise to make this work?
No–and that's the point I'd most want people to hear. You don't need to wire up connections, you don't need engineers pulling files off a server, and nobody's monitoring jobs overnight. The data is right there in Snowflake, and your analysts can just work with it directly. That's really the whole appeal: the barrier to getting started effectively disappears.
Can customers combine your data with their own?
Yes, and that's where a lot of the magic happens. You can join our intelligence with your internal data instantly to find new signals, improve your models, tighten up your compliance and risk workflows–and nothing has to be exported from either side. The data stays put; you just query across all of it. That's genuinely hard to do with a traditional feed, and it's one of the things customers get most excited about once they start.
What if a team wants to test a dataset before committing to it?
Go for it–that's exactly what the Marketplace is good for. You can discover and trial additional datasets, ours and other providers', with no infrastructure buildout and no drawn-out onboarding. So you can actually prove a dataset earns its place in your workflow before you build anything around it. We'd much rather a customer test, see the value, and then expand, than sign up to something on faith.
There's a lot of talk about AI right now. Can customers use it on your data?
They can, through Snowflake Cortex. It lets you put natural-language queries straight on top of the data, so an analyst can literally ask "what's our sanctions exposure here?" or "where does ownership risk sit across this fleet?" and get an answer in seconds rather than grinding through it manually. For compliance and risk teams especially, that's a real shift in how fast they can move.
How do you make sure the data is actually accurate and reliable?
Everything sits on top of a data quality framework that's built to keep the data consistent, accurate, timely and complete. That governance is the whole point, really– it's what lets you act on the data and reduce your risk, instead of spending half your week reconciling sources you don't fully trust. That standard is what's driven our reputation for generations, and it doesn't change just because the delivery mechanism is more modern.
What does working with Lloyd's List Intelligence actually look like once a customer signs on?
We treat it as a partnership. Our team gets in alongside yours to understand your architecture and your data model, work out which of our datasets fit your use case, and validate everything against real data before it goes anywhere near production. If you're coming off another provider, we help map the fields, align the identifiers and keep continuity so the business doesn't feel a bump. And we don't disappear once you're up and running–we stay with you as you scale, tune performance and bring on new datasets over time.
Who's getting the most out of this so far?
A real spread of people. Insurance and reinsurance teams pricing and underwriting marine risk. Trade finance and banking teams screening counterparties, validating shipments, watching for trade-based money laundering. Commodities and shipping operators optimising routes and managing voyage risk. And government, legal and compliance teams doing due diligence, investigations and sanctions monitoring. Different jobs, same underlying need: faster access to better data, right where the work happens. The net effect is less IT involvement, faster experimentation and a lot less time between a question and an insight — which matters most in those compliance and procurement workflows.
What are customers telling you?
Our customers don't just talk about volume of data. Customers have said the real difference for them is having a partner with a team of problem-solvers who understand their business–not simply more data. Not more data, better data, in the right format at the right time. And operators using our AIS and vessel characteristics data tell us it gives them the best information on the market to plan their long-term strategy. Those are the outcomes we actually care about.
And where does this go next?
We're really only at the beginning of what we want to do on Snowflake. The three listings live today are a foundation, and we're actively building out the catalogue from here–more of our core maritime datasets, more event-driven solution datasets like the Strait of Hormuz one, and deeper use of Snowflake's native capabilities, including Cortex, so customers get even more out of the data without ever leaving their environment. The ambition is straightforward: to be one of the richest, most trusted maritime data sources on the Snowflake Marketplace, and to keep deepening the partnership from there.
Finally–for someone reading this who's interested, how do they get started?
If you're already on Snowflake, you can find our listings on the Marketplace and start working with real data straight away–they're free to access, so you can explore AIS SeaOrbis and our solution datasets without building a single pipeline first. If you're earlier in the journey, come and talk to us–we'll help you find the right data for your use case and the quickest path to getting value from it inside Snowflake. You'll find Lloyd's List Intelligence on the Snowflake Marketplace, or you can get in touch with our team and we'll take it from there.
Trusted maritime data, now live on the Snowflake Marketplace.
