OpenCorporates

A London-based company called OpenCorporates has developed a platform that collects global corporate datasets -- many of which weren't available as open data -- and presents them as visualisations.

One of the most revealing aspects of the platform is a visualisation of the global corporate networks of the six biggest banks in the US -- Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and JP Morgan.


The map aims to illustrate how complex multinational companies are. It plots the number of subsidiaries by country, along with the ownership structure.

Taking Goldman Sachs as an example, the platform shows that in Hong Kong there's a company called Goldman Sachs Structured Products (Asia) Limited that's controlled by another company called Goldman Sachs (Asia) Finance, which is registered in Mauritius.

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That, in turn, is controlled by a company in Hong Kong, which is controlled by a company in New York, which is controlled by a company in Delaware, and that company is controlled by another company in Delaware called GS Holdings (Delaware). This company is a subsidiary of The Goldman Sachs Group in New York City.

There are hundreds of such chains, many of which have around 10 layers of control below the HQ.


Goldman Sachs has more than 4,000 separate corporate entities, a third of which are registered in countries such as the Cayman Islands and Mauritius, which one might describe as tax havens.

Similar patterns can be observed in all of the other banks.

The data has all been taken from publicly available data at the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Much of the data was available before only in PDF or web page form, so OpenCorporates had to develop scripts that would isolate and scrape the relevant information in an automated way, so that the database is futureproofed.

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For each data point, users can find out where the data comes from. This means that if any figures are wrong, OpenCorporates can identify the source of the bad data.


The plan is to create similar networks for every single corporation. Networks have already been created for large companies such as Starbucks,

Barclays and IBM.

The dataset is released as open data and third parties can collaborate by contributing to and correcting the data.

OpenCorporates

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Network data is currently available for just five percent of the 50 million companies in 70 jurisdictions presently in the system.

More will be added over the next few months.

Co-founder Chris Taggart told Wired.co.uk that extracting the data for the corporate networks had been really hard and really important. "Knowing what a modern corporation is an how it's all connected is absolutely critical for regulators, journalists, anti-corruption organisations and lawyers," he said.

He explains that lots of companies have corporate network data which they keep hidden away. "Not only are there audiences who don't have access to it, but there are also errors," he says. "We get emails saying the data is wrong. But almost always wrong on the official records."

Taggart believes that by putting the data out in the open, those errors will be noticed and the dataset will improve. "Open data is a really good way of getting high quality data as there are a lot more eyeballs and you can combine datasets that weren't formerly combined."

Taggard talks of other company data sources such as Dun &

Bradstreet, Experian and Duedil and refers to them as having "black box business models". By this he means that they rely on data sources such as Companies House filings that users have to pay for. "We don't think it's right that statutory information about companies should be paid for," he says.


OpenCorporate's hope is that by making data open, it will have higher quality data. Anyone can use the data, even commercially, but they must make the results of what they are using the data for public and freely available, under a sharealike attribution license. "If you don't want to do that because you have a proprietary dataset or a private one you can't make public then you can buy a non-sharealike license. It's the same way that GPL has a dual licence model. We have the same thing."

He says that they already have one of the big credit reference agencies buying their data and incorporating it into their own databases, which in turn, the agency charges for. "It's cheaper for them to buy our data, but they don't want to make their own database open so they pay for a license and sell it to their own users."

OpenCorporates is one of the startups based at London's Open Data Institute. ODI co-founder Nigel Shadbolt said: "Identifying the extensive, complex, and sometimes opaque connections which exist amongst global corporations is of enormous benefit to society and the economy. By opening up this data, OpenCorporates provide tools that promote transparency, accountability and efficient governance. Companies who believe in ethical trading and honest markets have nothing to fear and much to gain from open data. Understanding their networks will enable governments, businesses and citizens to make better decisions -- be they legislative, commercial, ethical or environmental. The tide has already turned towards openness, those who do not turn with it will be left behind."