Case Study: Canaccord Genuity achieves 10x faster analytics and major cost savings with Google Cloud Platform

Quest for a better investment platform leads to Google Containers, BigQuery and Sheets

Canaccord Genuity, a leading independent full‑service financial firm, relied on its Quest® investment‑analysis platform that had been largely unchanged since 2003 and ran on an obsolete client‑server stack (Windows Server 2003 / SQL Server 2005). The platform could not scale or perform to meet modern needs—Canaccord needed roughly 25× more capacity to analyze many more companies, regions and sectors, and the legacy system was slow, costly to maintain, and unable to handle larger datasets.

Partnering with SenTai, Canaccord rebuilt Quest® on Google Cloud Platform using Linux containers on Google Kubernetes Engine, Google BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Google Sheets for rule modeling. The new serverless‑style design compiles analysts’ spreadsheet rules into bytecode and processes massive datasets—delivering more than 10× faster runtimes (complex queries fell from ~10 hours to under 30 minutes), analysis of 9,000+ companies, billions of data points processed overnight, and significantly reduced costs with virtually unlimited scalability.

Canaccord Genuity

P.J. Davies

Quest Manager