
Map the Banks - chippy
http://mapthebanks.com/
======
reqres
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.

~~~
MaysonL
_although banks avoid doing anything illegal_

And how many billions of dollars in fines and settlements have all those big
banks paid in the past year for all those legal acts they've committed?

At the end, many of the "AAA" mortgage-backed securities were fraudulent:
backed by "liars' loans" backed by fraudulently inflated appraisals, and
fraudulent statements of buyers' ability to pay.

~~~
reqres
Contrary to media perception, the FI I worked with did put a huge amount of
resources into preventing illegal activity. Of course trying to avoid legal
trouble doesn't necessarily prevent it.

In my brief and painful experience, FIs genuinely do avoid breaking the law.
But they don't mind breaking the spirit of the law by finding a way around it.

------
drcode
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.

~~~
minimax
_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.

~~~
lmm
> 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?

The Goldman LME aluminium warehousing, where they paid people to deposit
aluminium with them to inflate the length of the queue to get aluminium out,
so that the queue was longer and they could charge more (literal!) rent before
people eventually got their aluminium out.

> 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.

I have a thesis that every megacorp turns to rent seeking, because they're too
rigid to innovate. But yeah, I suspect it's a small proportion of the profit
of the financial industry as a whole. A lot of people want to buy and sell
stuff, so there's a lot of money to be made in even a slim margin there.

------
notahacker
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
In all honesty, I can't think of how this data can be used for anything else.

~~~
cm2187
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.

------
7Figures2Commas
> 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-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-hope-3-down-mortgages-
will-boost-struggling-housing-market-2014-12-09)

~~~
JackFr
> 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 . . .

------
inglesp
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.

~~~
imron
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
Yep, we know!

------
bicknergseng
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
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).

------
jdmichal
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
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
Ah, thanks. I did miss that indicator that this is only the first step.

~~~
herah
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.

------
chippy
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-...](http://blog.opencorporates.com/2014/12/10/launching-map-the-banks-
campaign-to-map-the-global-financial-industry/)

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?

------
suprgeek
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)

------
snarkyturtle
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 }

------
sailfast
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
[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.

------
bernardom
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
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.

~~~
bernardom
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.

------
bluishgreen
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.

------
pyrocat
[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.

------
harkyns_castle
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
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"

------
p_eter_p
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
They're selling API access and the data:

[https://opencorporates.com/products](https://opencorporates.com/products)

------
femto
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/)

------
free2rhyme214
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
First of all it's "Bilderberg". Secondly, did aliens really shoot Kennedy?

------
prirun
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)

------
hessenwolf
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
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 ;) )

------
_mikz
* 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
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.

------
dev1n
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
Thanks for reporting this -- we'll get this fixed soon.

------
doczoidberg
> The financial crisis cost society 4 trillion dollars

is there any source for this?

~~~
herah
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...](http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The%20Crisis_2.pdf)

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
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.

------
ErikRogneby
I wasn't familiar with
[https://opencorporates.com/](https://opencorporates.com/) \- It looks like a
great resource.

------
johnlbevan2
[https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank](https://www.google.com/maps/search/bank)

------
solaarphunk
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
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.

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

~~~
collyw
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
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
[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

------
andrelaszlo
...with boughs of holly?

------
known
Brilliant site

------
ha292
naive nonsense

