9 ms·

Map the Banks

323 points by chippy 12y ago

sailfast 12y ago
This seems like a good idea, but when I look for source data for the United States I'm seeing state-level groups and no "missions" to parse additional U.S data. Anybody know if there's a plan to use the more available Federal regulatory data for places such as the United States? Example: https://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/warp_download_all.asp https://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/warp_download_all.asp
- ChrisTaggart 12y ago
  [Chris from OpenCorporates] This mission is specifically about bank and financial licences, as opposed to physical bank branch locations, which is slightly different (though related). We think this dataset is an essential foundation for such datasets, and others. It also links the banks to company records, and from that to potentially other data, from political contributions/lobbying to corporate networks (see https://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html https://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html -- some of this data came from the National Information Center, which is a joint project of the US banking regulators). However, if you think there's a company-related government dataset that should be scraped, please do go ahead and use turbot.opencorporates.com for that -- it's already been used for everything from civil aircraft registrations to mining licences to NHS Providers.
drcode 12y ago
Any entities that earn undeserved profits (and some will argue many financial institutions fall under this umbrella) want to stay invisible and opaque to maximize these earnings. I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society. I like this attempt to disinfect this mess with some sunlight, though at the end of the day the only way to truly solve these problems (as they may exist) will be for all of us to stop being willing participants in the system. I believe strongly that technology will offer solutions for this in the near future.
- branchless 12y ago
  Agree with the sentiment. Not sure about the tech bit. Tech has allowed banks to industrialize rent-seeking.
  - drcode 12y ago
    I agree technology can make things go either way and the jury is still out.
  - 525 12y ago
    Having technology perform many of the functions that front-office staff have traditionally done, allows banks to improve their efficiency - industrialise as you say. However, it also allows the financial industry to become commoditiesed and lowers the barriers to entry. You only need to walk down the City of London to see the sheer number of banks form all over the world. They all compete (except when they collude) and drive down prices. Secondly, you also start seeing large corporates doing their own banking - what does a bank to that BP can't do on their own?
    - branchless 12y ago
      Not sure I agree. The entire UK economy has been swallowed by big banking as they ramp up house prices meaning both parents have to work all hours. Also the idea of a level playing-field on competition doesn't exist IMHO. It's a corrupt area that needs squashing.
    - collyw 12y ago
      My banking charges only ever seem to go up, while the interest I earn in the bank is quite pathetic, due to the instability they have caused. We have had 7 years of "emergency low" interest rates here in Europe.
- minimax 12y ago
  I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society. This is a hugely popular sentiment in the wake of the financial crisis, but do you actually have some examples of rent seeking activity by banks in 2014 that is emblematic of this? Your modern megabank takes in billions of dollars in profits per quarter and I'm just curious where the rent seeking shakes out in all of that.
chippy 12y ago
This site is from OpenCorporates - have a look at their mission here: https://opencorporates.com/info/principles https://opencorporates.com/info/principles Edits: Here is the blog post announcing the project: http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-banks-campaign-to-map-the-global-financial-industry/ http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-... From the post: * Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. * Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them? * What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide? * Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia? * Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such? * Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
dev1n 12y ago
when I click the "sign up for a mission button" it sends me to an unsecured page to create a profile. should be https://missions.opencorporates.com/ https://missions.opencorporates.com/
- inglesp 12y ago
  Thanks for reporting this -- we'll get this fixed soon.
harkyns_castle 12y ago
I'm not clear on how this helps. I mean, the corrupt machinations would happen on the level of mouth-to-mouth conversations, I would guess, and not reported on a website. Won't this just show a massive blob of datapoints near Wall St and anywhere Goldman Sachs et al have metastasized? Not sure how, or what, connections will be shown/determined. I suspect they're pretty good at hiding things by now and have regulated away any glaring holes that might've been in the public domain.
- chippy 12y ago
  It's transparency, it all helps (especially when the data is there but no one has made the connections before). In other words: "Follow the money"
jdmichal 12y ago
Unless I'm not seeing some other visualization of the data, I don't really see how correlating companies to physical locations helps a whole lot, and was not what I expected to be the goal when I started reading. The pain point that needs to be addressed is "too big to fail", but mapping to physical location does nothing to help that. A more conceptual map showing, for instance, the players in the mortgage space, their relative size, and how they generally interact would actually be a step towards solving the problem. Now how to gather information like THAT is a whole other question. As a concrete example: Most of the major home insurers have offices in Florida, but don't actually write policies. Who is actually writing these policies? If we have everything tracing back to a single policy writer, then we have a major problem.
- andrewstuart2 12y ago
  This is apparently only the first step. > Governments and regulators are releasing huge amounts of data. Collecting, publishing & linking it to company data will give us the global picture of the finance sector. > OpenCorporates' mission is to bring this data into the open. This is a gargantuan task, so we thought we'd start with a single step: gather data about which companies are permitted to carry out what financial activities, where.
  - jdmichal 12y ago
    Ah, thanks. I did miss that indicator that this is only the first step.
    - herah 12y ago
      It really is the starting point. I work at OpenCorporates and have worked on this campaign! We don't know what the data will tell us unless we scrape all of it though one of my colleagues took a look at the financial licenses from US and found some interesting insights. For instance, if you think about which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? There are 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. Many are presumably outsourced - he have found some controlled by Ocwen and by Bank of America. This may be useful information for various reasons but we can't get there if we don't do the step 1 which is to have all the data scraped and published as open data so we can have many eyes examining it.
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> We believe there is a social contract between citizens (represented by the state) and companies. The state permits companies to carry out activities like banking or debt collection; in return, these companies agree to meet certain standards of behaviour: for example, only lending to people who can afford the debt, or backing their promises with a certain amount of assets. This is a bizarre statement that simply isn't true. Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing. This has been done through legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, as well as government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the state is still doing it[1]. [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-will-boost-struggling-housing-market-2014-12-09 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-...
- JackFr 12y ago
  > Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing. Most often that person was the state itself . . .
solaarphunk 12y ago
This seems a little misguided, seeing as how the financial crisis had many actors including regulators, home loan originators, academics which attributed far too much strength to certain portfolio management methodologies and models. Certainly there were actors within banks who were also corrupting the financial system, but in no way were they alone in the destruction of wealth.
- xnull2guest 12y ago
  And the rating industry, and geopolitical actors, and the World Bank, and hedge funds, etc, etc. I absolutely agree. But I'm afraid this could get into perfect being the enemy of the good territory. Unfortunately no model is going to be complete - even including these primary actors you would need to eventually model entire populations to capture macro-scale effects of the markets at play. I don't think they need to be so perfect, however. Teasing out this sort of information ('mapping it') is not going to be a panacea that can detect all fraud. But it will probably be a useful tool to human experts who can combine knowledge from a partial map with information from other sources and a generally mature understanding of the industry.
bicknergseng 12y ago
From another comment: >>It's transparency, it all helps Sorta pedantic and not picking on that comment so much as the CA Prop 65/label GMOs/Citizens United world that we live in: transparency might not be a real solution or means of achieving some goal. Increasing transparency and generating more data when there is already a very low signal to noise ratio and an even lower impetus to act on actual signal feels like a waste of time and energy. For example, we don't need any more data about NSA privacy invasions or CIA torture or effective criminal wrongdoing on the part of the financial industry; we know there is willing, flagrant illegal activity, yet modern society (not just American society, mind you) is unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it. So what will more data get us? Seems like a waste of time if the desired outcome is change.
- chippy 12y ago
  So the rationale is that if you want change the first thing is to identify what needs changing. If you want changing in the world of international banking, you should understand the world of international banking, right? Now, that does depends on the level of "change" as revolution can simply ignore the current state and wipe the slate clean, but I would imagine that understanding how the system operates is not a waste of time if you want to change the system (and not remove it).
notahacker 12y ago
The cynic in me thinks that despite the tone of the presentation, this dataset and the way it's structured is vastly more useful for creating marketing plans to sell services to the financial sector than for encouraging responsibility in the financial sector.
- jevgeni 12y ago
  In all honesty, I can't think of how this data can be used for anything else.
  - cm2187 12y ago
    I am skeptical too about the relevance of this effort. But there is one thing it can be useful for, is to track the size of the shadow banking sector which is growing on the back of tougher regulations that force banks out of many activities. But the shadow banking sector is already on the regulators radars so I am not sure what this is going to achieve.
pyrocat 12y ago
http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter first time I've seen CSS3 columns in the wild, pretty neat.
johnlbevan2 12y ago
https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank
reqres 12y ago
I'd love to contribute to this project, especially since I wasted years of my life mining and forecasting data on financial institutions - it would be nice to put that skill to a good cause. But if the goal is really to make financial institutions more accountable, my years of experience working in the industry tell me this will be a largely fruitless exercise. I expect the yield on mining public data for that nugget of information to nail a financial institution is going to be extremely low if not nil. Financial institutions only have to disclose the highest, most superficial levels of information to the public when it comes to the breakdown/allocation of their assets and liabilities. If you open up central bank data or the notes to a FI's financial statements, you will not find a meaningful delineation of where a banks assets are or what risk profiles they have. Having worked in a very large commercial/investment bank and directly with the CFO, I know first hand that although banks avoid doing anything illegal, they will have no qualms with bending the rules in their favour. Most well run banks know exactly which rules are being bent and they will know exactly how to classify it in any public submission to prevent any smell. They have large finance and investor relations teams who pore over every decimal point in any report and have prepared answers to virtually all regulator questions. The information you need to properly regulate banks are not in the public domain. Take the last financial crisis for example. I don't think any publicly available financial statement or report would have told you that banks were holding onto a tremendous volume subprime mortgages classed as 'AAA'. This only emerged when huge holes appeared in balance sheets when the US economy slowed and a whole bunch of assets had to be written off. The kind of remedy required to mitigate the chance of another crisis is a systemic overhaul of how banks are allowed to operate and how they are regulated. I'm sorry, but holding them to account with data provided by banks themselves will not yield much result. EDIT: Sorry for being a jerk/cynic about this effort. I'm actually a big fan of OpenCorporates. But I'm still a bit disillusioned having quit in 2011.
- 525 12y ago
  Things are changing. If I understand Dodd-Frank/EMIR correctly, every OTC derivatives trade now has to be reported to the regulator within something like 15 minutes (or was it 15 days?). Anyways, the regulators now will have a pretty complete picture of what each bank holds, at least for a single asset-class. Though, I suspect information on exchange traded stocks, and centrally cleared swaps are also available to the regulators, via the respective exchanges and execution facilities.
ha292 12y ago
naive nonsense
inglesp 12y ago
Hi HN, I work for OpenCorporates, the team behind this, and we were planning to do a "Show HN" in the next couple of days, once we'd got a few wrinkles sorted out. In the meantime, I'll be around for a bit and try to answer any questions.
- samstave 12y ago
  So tangential, but germane: What if anything have you learned about all the banker deaths in the last ~24 months. Do you think, as some do, that its just given the population-size of the banking sector, these deaths are all normal? Or do you think there is a wider story here? Or do you not know what I am talking about? [1] [1]This is not an authoritative list, and I have never read this particular site, but its one of the first on google: http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/ http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/
- imron 12y ago
  One of those wrinkles is the mobile experience of your site, which is currently almost unusable - a big chunk of navigation always taking up the top 3/4 of the screen, and then a tiny fraction of scrollable content.
  - inglesp 12y ago
    Yep, we know!
- moriokumura 12y ago
  What' the source of world map? I'm surprised you are listing Somaliland and Northern Cyprus as an independent nation, but not listing some little nations. (e.g. Vatican, Andorra)
- mipapage 12y ago
  I'd like to follow you somehow (no time like the future!), but no email signup and no sign of twitter. Suggestions?
  - 12y ago
bernardom 12y ago
A really good place to start (before scraping various data sources) would be to explain how the output will be organized. For example, it looks from the bottom of the map that they're classifying institutions as: * Consumer Credit * Other * Mortgage * Debt Collection * Bank/Trust * Insurer * Authorized Agent * Mutual/Co-op/Credit Union What is the rationale for this classification scheme? Are there going to be second level classifications? For example, most large commercial bank/trusts have mortgage arms, consumer credit arms (credit cards and other lines of credit), consumer debt, wealth management, etc. Hell, take just one sub-industry: wealth management. A large bank will have a trust department ("private wealth" or "private banking"), a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), and a Broker/Dealer. They're sometimes completely separately managed. They're different legal entities and regulated by different government organs (FINRA for the broker/dealer and the OCC/SEC for the other two). And that's just wealth management. Just getting a zoology of financial institutions would be a great start.
- ChrisTaggart 12y ago
  Hi, Chris from OpenCorporates. We're also getting the native classifications, i.e. those given by each regulators, and in a sense these are mappings. When researching this, the are many, many different classifications (particularly in the consumer finance and shadow banking area), and one of the side benefits this will surface those classifications, laying one of the foundations for a more formal ontology.
  - samstave 12y ago
    Where do I learn more about shadow banking?
  - bernardom 12y ago
    Cool- thanks for the response. The only thing I'll add is that there are very useful classifications beyond how the regulators see it. That data are much harder to get, but very useful. For example, RIAs are a world unto themselves, but they can be reasonably segmented in a few different ways: subadvisors vs direct advisors, asset gatherers vs. asset managers, use open architecture vs. not.
femto 12y ago
Is SIRCA-Tech [1] relevant here? SIRCA is (was?) an Australian university organisation, that collects financial data for research purposes. I gather that it has outgrown its humble beginnings to be come one of the world's largest collections of international financial data. Perhaps Map the Banks could access this data by hitching up with a local university? [1] http://www.sirca.org.au/ http://www.sirca.org.au/
_mikz 12y ago
* I missed my mission for Czech Republic * even when I found the data to be scraped, I did not what/where to scrape * if you are Czech, I just submitted a mission: https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en
- inglesp 12y ago
  I don't see your submitted mission in the system, and the link in your post seems broken. Do let me know if you're having any problems.
doczoidberg 12y ago
> The financial crisis cost society 4 trillion dollars is there any source for this?
- herah 12y ago
  We found lots of different estimates ranging from 4 trillion to 12.8 trillion dollars and chose to use the conservative figure. Better Market estimated at 12.8 trillion: http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The%20Crisis_2.pdf http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The... IMF said $4 trillion dollar: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf On reflection, Perhps we should perhaps have gone with a higher figure, but chose the conservative figure'. So, we are thinking of increasing the "4 trillion" to "over 10 trillion" to reflect a mid-point between the variation in estimates. Thanks for pointing it out!
  - JackFr 12y ago
    Yeah, but the bulk $12 trillion number is unrealized GDP, due to the recession. If your going to count that, you need to count the excess GDP generated in the years leading up to the crisis by free and easy credit as the bubble inflated. Here's the irony, banks needed to be bailed out because they were sitting on bad assets. The bad assets typically were mortgages which were not being paid. But the loans had been made -- that money was sloshing around the economy all though 2004-2007. That isn't to say people who took vacations on cash-out mortgage refi's are the bad guy. I don't think they are. My take is the large financial crisis, that is the giant asset bubble which burst in 2008 was ultimate caused by many players, both small and large, making (in retrospect) imprudent decisions in good faith. I am all for outing fraud and market rigging, and all sorts of other illicit shenanigans, but the crisis itself was brought on by credit and leverage, like every other crisis before it.
suprgeek 12y ago
This is a laudable effort to bring more facts to light concerning banks & other financial institutions. Just don't expect it make a whit of difference to the "Social Contract" that is mentioned. As long as "Too-Big-to-Fail" and the like exists, Banks & other financial institutions have incredible (almost unimaginable) power & influence over the state [1] at least in the USA. There is revolving door between Federal officials in Treasury and the Federal Reserve etc and big banks such as Citigroup & Goldman Sachs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo
p_eter_p 12y ago
It seems odd that the source for the completed bots is not available. I would think many of the solutions would be substantially similar. Is there any plan to open source these?
- logn 12y ago
  They're selling API access and the data: https://opencorporates.com/products https://opencorporates.com/products
snarkyturtle 12y ago
Some of the css is sorta wonky, and moving the map causes it to be cut-off at weird places. My recommendation is to use calc along with vh: .map-application { height: 100vh; } #map { height: calc(100% - 13em); //100% - height of .info-bar }
free2rhyme214 12y ago
The Builderberg Group, CFR, TC, RIIA, Club of Rome and the Round Table care 0% if banks are documented. This is nice in theory but there's a reason why no one has been able to do much of anything about this for years now. The banking industry won't be "disrupted" until the financial system collapses.
- jevgeni 12y ago
  First of all it's "Bilderberg". Secondly, did aliens really shoot Kennedy?
jevgeni 12y ago
So, I have to write scrapers for someone who would try to "disrupt" banks for free?
- collyw 12y ago
  You don't have to. I am thinking about it, as a lot of job ads want to see some examples of your work, and my stuff is all in house. If the code is going to a good cause, why not.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    This is still closed in-house code - as much as I looked on the site, the code of completed missions isn't actually available to anyone other than the "opencorporates.com" company (Chrinon Ltd - https://opencorporates.com/info/licence https://opencorporates.com/info/licence), so this wouldn't be useful as 'examples of your work' at all. They do claim on the legal page that "we agree to make it available via the world wide web or analogous means under a licence with at most share-alike and attribution restrictions" but I haven't actually managed to find any of the code for the completed missions. Am I missing something?
    - ChrisTaggart 12y ago
      [Chris from OpenCorporates here]: Any code you write is your code... and we'd be happy for you to share it by whatever means you want, e.g. by pushing to a public github/gitlab repo. We did originally plan to do this by default, but in an earlier version of this work some contributors said that they didn't mind OpenCorporates having the benefit, but didn't want proprietary business information companies to have it. We've got a ticket to add to the manifest and option public_repo field, so that the location of the public repo is easily discoverable, and hope to implement in the next week or so. The share-alike refers to the underlying data, but again, if you want to make it available to the world under a CC0 licence we have no problem with that. Hope this clears things up. C
hessenwolf 12y ago
What on Earth is the map supposed to do? I click on it and data appear along the bottom? Am I missing something? Why is it all red? My eyes burn. How useful is this data without quality control? How sustainable is the project? Did it come out of a hackathon, or is it part of an organisation?
rmc 12y ago
OpenStreetMap has ~165,000 banks mapped and tagged. http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=bank http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=bank This might be another data source (thought I think the OP knows ;) )
andrelaszlo 12y ago
...with boughs of holly?
ErikRogneby 12y ago
I wasn't familiar with https://opencorporates.com/ https://opencorporates.com/ - It looks like a great resource.
known 12y ago
Brilliant site
bluishgreen 12y ago
To all the naysayers, I say this: Think of this as a data forensics effort rather than just some kind of look up table. When you have massive amounts of data, you can do simple checkpoints like amount of money flowing into any point in the circuit is the amount of money flowing out of it, that kind of stupid validation system alone will uncover a ton of stuff, and imagine doing a little bit more machine learning, you can discover all sorts of stuff, at least a probable cause to alert a govt agency who are both understaffed and clueless at the same time. This is very hard problem and complicated enough that it cannot be trusted to the government alone. I welcome this open source effort to data forensics.
prirun 12y ago
I believe the best contribution I can make is to never do business with a bank that is also a primary dealer (US Treasuries). The list is available at: http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/pridealers_current.html http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/pridealers_current.html

323 points by chippy 12y ago

This seems like a good idea, but when I look for source data for the United States I'm seeing state-level groups and no "missions" to parse additional U.S data. Anybody know if there's a plan to use the more available Federal regulatory data for places such as the United States? Example: https://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/warp_download_all.asp https://www2.fdic.gov/idasp/warp_download_all.asp

ChrisTaggart 12y ago
[Chris from OpenCorporates] This mission is specifically about bank and financial licences, as opposed to physical bank branch locations, which is slightly different (though related). We think this dataset is an essential foundation for such datasets, and others. It also links the banks to company records, and from that to potentially other data, from political contributions/lobbying to corporate networks (see https://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html https://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html -- some of this data came from the National Information Center, which is a joint project of the US banking regulators). However, if you think there's a company-related government dataset that should be scraped, please do go ahead and use turbot.opencorporates.com for that -- it's already been used for everything from civil aircraft registrations to mining licences to NHS Providers.

drcode 12y ago

Any entities that earn undeserved profits (and some will argue many financial institutions fall under this umbrella) want to stay invisible and opaque to maximize these earnings. I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society. I like this attempt to disinfect this mess with some sunlight, though at the end of the day the only way to truly solve these problems (as they may exist) will be for all of us to stop being willing participants in the system. I believe strongly that technology will offer solutions for this in the near future.

branchless 12y ago
Agree with the sentiment. Not sure about the tech bit. Tech has allowed banks to industrialize rent-seeking.
- drcode 12y ago
  I agree technology can make things go either way and the jury is still out.
- 525 12y ago
  Having technology perform many of the functions that front-office staff have traditionally done, allows banks to improve their efficiency - industrialise as you say. However, it also allows the financial industry to become commoditiesed and lowers the barriers to entry. You only need to walk down the City of London to see the sheer number of banks form all over the world. They all compete (except when they collude) and drive down prices. Secondly, you also start seeing large corporates doing their own banking - what does a bank to that BP can't do on their own?
  - branchless 12y ago
    Not sure I agree. The entire UK economy has been swallowed by big banking as they ramp up house prices meaning both parents have to work all hours. Also the idea of a level playing-field on competition doesn't exist IMHO. It's a corrupt area that needs squashing.
  - collyw 12y ago
    My banking charges only ever seem to go up, while the interest I earn in the bank is quite pathetic, due to the instability they have caused. We have had 7 years of "emergency low" interest rates here in Europe.
minimax 12y ago
I think a case can be made that a substantial percentage of profits earned by the financial industry derive from economic "rent seeking" and are not materially contributing to productivity in society. This is a hugely popular sentiment in the wake of the financial crisis, but do you actually have some examples of rent seeking activity by banks in 2014 that is emblematic of this? Your modern megabank takes in billions of dollars in profits per quarter and I'm just curious where the rent seeking shakes out in all of that.

chippy 12y ago

This site is from OpenCorporates - have a look at their mission here: https://opencorporates.com/info/principles https://opencorporates.com/info/principles Edits: Here is the blog post announcing the project: http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-banks-campaign-to-map-the-global-financial-industry/ http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-... From the post: * Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. * Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them? * What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide? * Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia? * Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such? * Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dev1n 12y ago

when I click the "sign up for a mission button" it sends me to an unsecured page to create a profile. should be https://missions.opencorporates.com/ https://missions.opencorporates.com/

inglesp 12y ago
Thanks for reporting this -- we'll get this fixed soon.

harkyns_castle 12y ago

I'm not clear on how this helps. I mean, the corrupt machinations would happen on the level of mouth-to-mouth conversations, I would guess, and not reported on a website. Won't this just show a massive blob of datapoints near Wall St and anywhere Goldman Sachs et al have metastasized? Not sure how, or what, connections will be shown/determined. I suspect they're pretty good at hiding things by now and have regulated away any glaring holes that might've been in the public domain.

chippy 12y ago
It's transparency, it all helps (especially when the data is there but no one has made the connections before). In other words: "Follow the money"

jdmichal 12y ago

Unless I'm not seeing some other visualization of the data, I don't really see how correlating companies to physical locations helps a whole lot, and was not what I expected to be the goal when I started reading. The pain point that needs to be addressed is "too big to fail", but mapping to physical location does nothing to help that. A more conceptual map showing, for instance, the players in the mortgage space, their relative size, and how they generally interact would actually be a step towards solving the problem. Now how to gather information like THAT is a whole other question. As a concrete example: Most of the major home insurers have offices in Florida, but don't actually write policies. Who is actually writing these policies? If we have everything tracing back to a single policy writer, then we have a major problem.

andrewstuart2 12y ago
This is apparently only the first step. > Governments and regulators are releasing huge amounts of data. Collecting, publishing & linking it to company data will give us the global picture of the finance sector. > OpenCorporates' mission is to bring this data into the open. This is a gargantuan task, so we thought we'd start with a single step: gather data about which companies are permitted to carry out what financial activities, where.
- jdmichal 12y ago
  Ah, thanks. I did miss that indicator that this is only the first step.
  - herah 12y ago
    It really is the starting point. I work at OpenCorporates and have worked on this campaign! We don't know what the data will tell us unless we scrape all of it though one of my colleagues took a look at the financial licenses from US and found some interesting insights. For instance, if you think about which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? There are 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. Many are presumably outsourced - he have found some controlled by Ocwen and by Bank of America. This may be useful information for various reasons but we can't get there if we don't do the step 1 which is to have all the data scraped and published as open data so we can have many eyes examining it.

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> We believe there is a social contract between citizens (represented by the state) and companies. The state permits companies to carry out activities like banking or debt collection; in return, these companies agree to meet certain standards of behaviour: for example, only lending to people who can afford the debt, or backing their promises with a certain amount of assets. This is a bizarre statement that simply isn't true. Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing. This has been done through legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, as well as government-sponsored entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And the state is still doing it[1]. [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-will-boost-struggling-housing-market-2014-12-09 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-...

JackFr 12y ago
> Historically, the state has just as frequently encouraged lenders to lend to people who couldn't otherwise afford what they were purchasing. Most often that person was the state itself . . .

solaarphunk 12y ago

This seems a little misguided, seeing as how the financial crisis had many actors including regulators, home loan originators, academics which attributed far too much strength to certain portfolio management methodologies and models. Certainly there were actors within banks who were also corrupting the financial system, but in no way were they alone in the destruction of wealth.

xnull2guest 12y ago
And the rating industry, and geopolitical actors, and the World Bank, and hedge funds, etc, etc. I absolutely agree. But I'm afraid this could get into perfect being the enemy of the good territory. Unfortunately no model is going to be complete - even including these primary actors you would need to eventually model entire populations to capture macro-scale effects of the markets at play. I don't think they need to be so perfect, however. Teasing out this sort of information ('mapping it') is not going to be a panacea that can detect all fraud. But it will probably be a useful tool to human experts who can combine knowledge from a partial map with information from other sources and a generally mature understanding of the industry.

bicknergseng 12y ago

From another comment: >>It's transparency, it all helps Sorta pedantic and not picking on that comment so much as the CA Prop 65/label GMOs/Citizens United world that we live in: transparency might not be a real solution or means of achieving some goal. Increasing transparency and generating more data when there is already a very low signal to noise ratio and an even lower impetus to act on actual signal feels like a waste of time and energy. For example, we don't need any more data about NSA privacy invasions or CIA torture or effective criminal wrongdoing on the part of the financial industry; we know there is willing, flagrant illegal activity, yet modern society (not just American society, mind you) is unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it. So what will more data get us? Seems like a waste of time if the desired outcome is change.

chippy 12y ago
So the rationale is that if you want change the first thing is to identify what needs changing. If you want changing in the world of international banking, you should understand the world of international banking, right? Now, that does depends on the level of "change" as revolution can simply ignore the current state and wipe the slate clean, but I would imagine that understanding how the system operates is not a waste of time if you want to change the system (and not remove it).

notahacker 12y ago

The cynic in me thinks that despite the tone of the presentation, this dataset and the way it's structured is vastly more useful for creating marketing plans to sell services to the financial sector than for encouraging responsibility in the financial sector.

jevgeni 12y ago
In all honesty, I can't think of how this data can be used for anything else.
- cm2187 12y ago
  I am skeptical too about the relevance of this effort. But there is one thing it can be useful for, is to track the size of the shadow banking sector which is growing on the back of tougher regulations that force banks out of many activities. But the shadow banking sector is already on the regulators radars so I am not sure what this is going to achieve.

pyrocat 12y ago

http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter http://mapthebanks.com/#section-why-does-this-matter first time I've seen CSS3 columns in the wild, pretty neat.

johnlbevan2 12y ago

https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank

reqres 12y ago

I'd love to contribute to this project, especially since I wasted years of my life mining and forecasting data on financial institutions - it would be nice to put that skill to a good cause. But if the goal is really to make financial institutions more accountable, my years of experience working in the industry tell me this will be a largely fruitless exercise. I expect the yield on mining public data for that nugget of information to nail a financial institution is going to be extremely low if not nil. Financial institutions only have to disclose the highest, most superficial levels of information to the public when it comes to the breakdown/allocation of their assets and liabilities. If you open up central bank data or the notes to a FI's financial statements, you will not find a meaningful delineation of where a banks assets are or what risk profiles they have. Having worked in a very large commercial/investment bank and directly with the CFO, I know first hand that although banks avoid doing anything illegal, they will have no qualms with bending the rules in their favour. Most well run banks know exactly which rules are being bent and they will know exactly how to classify it in any public submission to prevent any smell. They have large finance and investor relations teams who pore over every decimal point in any report and have prepared answers to virtually all regulator questions. The information you need to properly regulate banks are not in the public domain. Take the last financial crisis for example. I don't think any publicly available financial statement or report would have told you that banks were holding onto a tremendous volume subprime mortgages classed as 'AAA'. This only emerged when huge holes appeared in balance sheets when the US economy slowed and a whole bunch of assets had to be written off. The kind of remedy required to mitigate the chance of another crisis is a systemic overhaul of how banks are allowed to operate and how they are regulated. I'm sorry, but holding them to account with data provided by banks themselves will not yield much result. EDIT: Sorry for being a jerk/cynic about this effort. I'm actually a big fan of OpenCorporates. But I'm still a bit disillusioned having quit in 2011.

525 12y ago
Things are changing. If I understand Dodd-Frank/EMIR correctly, every OTC derivatives trade now has to be reported to the regulator within something like 15 minutes (or was it 15 days?). Anyways, the regulators now will have a pretty complete picture of what each bank holds, at least for a single asset-class. Though, I suspect information on exchange traded stocks, and centrally cleared swaps are also available to the regulators, via the respective exchanges and execution facilities.

ha292 12y ago

naive nonsense

inglesp 12y ago

Hi HN, I work for OpenCorporates, the team behind this, and we were planning to do a "Show HN" in the next couple of days, once we'd got a few wrinkles sorted out. In the meantime, I'll be around for a bit and try to answer any questions.

samstave 12y ago
So tangential, but germane: What if anything have you learned about all the banker deaths in the last ~24 months. Do you think, as some do, that its just given the population-size of the banking sector, these deaths are all normal? Or do you think there is a wider story here? Or do you not know what I am talking about? [1] [1]This is not an authoritative list, and I have never read this particular site, but its one of the first on google: http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/ http://www.hangthebankers.com/48-suspicious-banking-deaths/
imron 12y ago
One of those wrinkles is the mobile experience of your site, which is currently almost unusable - a big chunk of navigation always taking up the top 3/4 of the screen, and then a tiny fraction of scrollable content.
- inglesp 12y ago
  Yep, we know!
moriokumura 12y ago
What' the source of world map? I'm surprised you are listing Somaliland and Northern Cyprus as an independent nation, but not listing some little nations. (e.g. Vatican, Andorra)
mipapage 12y ago
I'd like to follow you somehow (no time like the future!), but no email signup and no sign of twitter. Suggestions?
- 12y ago

bernardom 12y ago

A really good place to start (before scraping various data sources) would be to explain how the output will be organized. For example, it looks from the bottom of the map that they're classifying institutions as: * Consumer Credit * Other * Mortgage * Debt Collection * Bank/Trust * Insurer * Authorized Agent * Mutual/Co-op/Credit Union What is the rationale for this classification scheme? Are there going to be second level classifications? For example, most large commercial bank/trusts have mortgage arms, consumer credit arms (credit cards and other lines of credit), consumer debt, wealth management, etc. Hell, take just one sub-industry: wealth management. A large bank will have a trust department ("private wealth" or "private banking"), a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA), and a Broker/Dealer. They're sometimes completely separately managed. They're different legal entities and regulated by different government organs (FINRA for the broker/dealer and the OCC/SEC for the other two). And that's just wealth management. Just getting a zoology of financial institutions would be a great start.

ChrisTaggart 12y ago
Hi, Chris from OpenCorporates. We're also getting the native classifications, i.e. those given by each regulators, and in a sense these are mappings. When researching this, the are many, many different classifications (particularly in the consumer finance and shadow banking area), and one of the side benefits this will surface those classifications, laying one of the foundations for a more formal ontology.
- samstave 12y ago
  Where do I learn more about shadow banking?
- bernardom 12y ago
  Cool- thanks for the response. The only thing I'll add is that there are very useful classifications beyond how the regulators see it. That data are much harder to get, but very useful. For example, RIAs are a world unto themselves, but they can be reasonably segmented in a few different ways: subadvisors vs direct advisors, asset gatherers vs. asset managers, use open architecture vs. not.

femto 12y ago

Is SIRCA-Tech [1] relevant here? SIRCA is (was?) an Australian university organisation, that collects financial data for research purposes. I gather that it has outgrown its humble beginnings to be come one of the world's largest collections of international financial data. Perhaps Map the Banks could access this data by hitching up with a local university? [1] http://www.sirca.org.au/ http://www.sirca.org.au/

_mikz 12y ago

* I missed my mission for Czech Republic * even when I found the data to be scraped, I did not what/where to scrape * if you are Czech, I just submitted a mission: https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en https://www.cnb.cz/cnb/jerrs_en

inglesp 12y ago
I don't see your submitted mission in the system, and the link in your post seems broken. Do let me know if you're having any problems.

doczoidberg 12y ago

> The financial crisis cost society 4 trillion dollars is there any source for this?

herah 12y ago
We found lots of different estimates ranging from 4 trillion to 12.8 trillion dollars and chose to use the conservative figure. Better Market estimated at 12.8 trillion: http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The%20Crisis_2.pdf http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The... IMF said $4 trillion dollar: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/pdf/text.pdf On reflection, Perhps we should perhaps have gone with a higher figure, but chose the conservative figure'. So, we are thinking of increasing the "4 trillion" to "over 10 trillion" to reflect a mid-point between the variation in estimates. Thanks for pointing it out!
- JackFr 12y ago
  Yeah, but the bulk $12 trillion number is unrealized GDP, due to the recession. If your going to count that, you need to count the excess GDP generated in the years leading up to the crisis by free and easy credit as the bubble inflated. Here's the irony, banks needed to be bailed out because they were sitting on bad assets. The bad assets typically were mortgages which were not being paid. But the loans had been made -- that money was sloshing around the economy all though 2004-2007. That isn't to say people who took vacations on cash-out mortgage refi's are the bad guy. I don't think they are. My take is the large financial crisis, that is the giant asset bubble which burst in 2008 was ultimate caused by many players, both small and large, making (in retrospect) imprudent decisions in good faith. I am all for outing fraud and market rigging, and all sorts of other illicit shenanigans, but the crisis itself was brought on by credit and leverage, like every other crisis before it.

suprgeek 12y ago

This is a laudable effort to bring more facts to light concerning banks & other financial institutions. Just don't expect it make a whit of difference to the "Social Contract" that is mentioned. As long as "Too-Big-to-Fail" and the like exists, Banks & other financial institutions have incredible (almost unimaginable) power & influence over the state [1] at least in the USA. There is revolving door between Federal officials in Treasury and the Federal Reserve etc and big banks such as Citigroup & Goldman Sachs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJpTxONxvoo

p_eter_p 12y ago

It seems odd that the source for the completed bots is not available. I would think many of the solutions would be substantially similar. Is there any plan to open source these?

logn 12y ago
They're selling API access and the data: https://opencorporates.com/products https://opencorporates.com/products

snarkyturtle 12y ago

Some of the css is sorta wonky, and moving the map causes it to be cut-off at weird places. My recommendation is to use calc along with vh: .map-application { height: 100vh; } #map { height: calc(100% - 13em); //100% - height of .info-bar }

free2rhyme214 12y ago

The Builderberg Group, CFR, TC, RIIA, Club of Rome and the Round Table care 0% if banks are documented. This is nice in theory but there's a reason why no one has been able to do much of anything about this for years now. The banking industry won't be "disrupted" until the financial system collapses.

jevgeni 12y ago
First of all it's "Bilderberg". Secondly, did aliens really shoot Kennedy?

jevgeni 12y ago

So, I have to write scrapers for someone who would try to "disrupt" banks for free?

collyw 12y ago
You don't have to. I am thinking about it, as a lot of job ads want to see some examples of your work, and my stuff is all in house. If the code is going to a good cause, why not.
- PeterisP 12y ago
  This is still closed in-house code - as much as I looked on the site, the code of completed missions isn't actually available to anyone other than the "opencorporates.com" company (Chrinon Ltd - https://opencorporates.com/info/licence https://opencorporates.com/info/licence), so this wouldn't be useful as 'examples of your work' at all. They do claim on the legal page that "we agree to make it available via the world wide web or analogous means under a licence with at most share-alike and attribution restrictions" but I haven't actually managed to find any of the code for the completed missions. Am I missing something?
  - ChrisTaggart 12y ago
    [Chris from OpenCorporates here]: Any code you write is your code... and we'd be happy for you to share it by whatever means you want, e.g. by pushing to a public github/gitlab repo. We did originally plan to do this by default, but in an earlier version of this work some contributors said that they didn't mind OpenCorporates having the benefit, but didn't want proprietary business information companies to have it. We've got a ticket to add to the manifest and option public_repo field, so that the location of the public repo is easily discoverable, and hope to implement in the next week or so. The share-alike refers to the underlying data, but again, if you want to make it available to the world under a CC0 licence we have no problem with that. Hope this clears things up. C

hessenwolf 12y ago

What on Earth is the map supposed to do? I click on it and data appear along the bottom? Am I missing something? Why is it all red? My eyes burn. How useful is this data without quality control? How sustainable is the project? Did it come out of a hackathon, or is it part of an organisation?

rmc 12y ago

OpenStreetMap has ~165,000 banks mapped and tagged. http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=bank http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/amenity=bank This might be another data source (thought I think the OP knows ;) )

andrelaszlo 12y ago

...with boughs of holly?

ErikRogneby 12y ago

I wasn't familiar with https://opencorporates.com/ https://opencorporates.com/ - It looks like a great resource.

known 12y ago

Brilliant site

bluishgreen 12y ago

To all the naysayers, I say this: Think of this as a data forensics effort rather than just some kind of look up table. When you have massive amounts of data, you can do simple checkpoints like amount of money flowing into any point in the circuit is the amount of money flowing out of it, that kind of stupid validation system alone will uncover a ton of stuff, and imagine doing a little bit more machine learning, you can discover all sorts of stuff, at least a probable cause to alert a govt agency who are both understaffed and clueless at the same time. This is very hard problem and complicated enough that it cannot be trusted to the government alone. I welcome this open source effort to data forensics.

prirun 12y ago

I believe the best contribution I can make is to never do business with a bank that is also a primary dealer (US Treasuries). The list is available at: http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/pridealers_current.html http://www.ny.frb.org/markets/pridealers_current.html