Summary: Booz Allen Hamilton developed a novel methodology to study global financial networks geospatially for the U.S. Government. This methodology provided analysts the ability to assess where in the world an entity operates within the context of the global banking system.
Client Challenge: The U.S. Government, in studying a particular country, needed to analyze the country’s global banking footprint. However, analyzing banking networks geospatially is especially difficult because banks and account holders are both geospatially dynamic. For example, a bank can have branches in multiple cities, and a person can hold accounts at various branch locations in multiple banks. Therefore, financial network data must be transformed in order to render the desired information sought by the client.
How Booz Allen Helped: After first compiling and organizing large amounts of banking data from the country of interest’s financial network, Booz Allen identified the static geospatial information and converted this into usable network formats. Our analysts then examined the data and the client’s problem set to devise a unique methodology that would allow the financial network’s geospatial information to be analyzed. Application of the methodology provided extractable, static geospatial data from the country of interest’s financial network. The new data allowed our analysts to examine the changes to the network over two time periods and make critical observations. Once our analysis was complete, Booz Allen produced an analytical report of the findings and an explanation of the methodology that was shared with several other government stakeholders who follow this country of interest.
Results Achieved: Booz Allen recognized the unique challenge of our client's problem, and initiated the development of a new methodology to extract geospatial data from banking data. As a result, the client received a repeatable process that renders meaningful, useful information from complex data sets. The high-profile report that Booz Allen wrote was found to be valuable to multiple U.S. Government clients. Conduct of this project also revealed current information gaps that were brought to the client’s attention.
