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.
Banks are inherently opaque -- in many cases their own management doesn't understand their own balance sheet.
One of the great changes over the past few decades has been the migration of investment banks from partnerships to public equity structures. When an investment bank was a partnership, its "shareholders" were bankers and former bankers, with a deep understanding of the assets and liabilities _and_ of the ways in which management could manipulate their accounting. Those owners were highly incentivized to make sure the bank was properly run, as much of their wealth was tied up in that equity, which was in an illiquid form that couldn't easily be sold or hedged.
The commercial banks were always public equity, but until a few decades ago generally took considerably less risk.
Investment bank managements have since discovered that the public markets were willing to provide plenty of capital, with much less rigorous and careful oversight. So they've migrated those partnership structures to public equity, which enables much larger and riskier balance sheets.
If we were seriously interested in regulating these institutions, we'd require them to be partnerships in the old form. Nothing unconstitutional about it, the Fed could make such structure a requirement for access to its desk. Yes, we'd have much smaller banks, and less liquid markets, but their self-regulation would be far better.
Your input is absolutely spot-on. IMHO, MapTheBanks should be enticing people to join to make it faster and easier to perform the kind of Palantir-like big data intelligence analysis upon relationships between entities that make it feasible to identify influences. Hoping to "nail" someone for their part in the crisis is interesting and looking to the past that cannot be changed.
More forward-looking is the following. Make it easy for the public to formulate queries and datamine against a structured dataset and unstructured data to accrete competing, evolving intelligence analysis models (that square off in prediction markets for rankings) of market entities (including individual executive participants).
This could be a far more powerful deterrent against activities that have bad optics than any regulatory framework. It can also drive a useful feedback mechanism to tell the regulators (via a mass of competing models all screaming for it) what objective data is needed to refine the models' predictive capabilities when backtesting revealed data in the aftermath of market failures like 2008.
OpenCorporates could get some funds by running the exchange services for the prediction markets, and/or setting a small fixed cut for supplying the platform to intelligence analyst teams that use the system for selling competitive intelligence analysis services to anyone who wants them to focus on a specific detail using their specific model (perhaps through metering API access to the data and processing instead of only GUI-level notebook-style access).
But that doesn't make it useless. Merely having lists is an important step.
For example, I do a lot of work with unstructured text (eg, news reports, transcripts). Having a list of names of financial entities means it is possible to link statements made by office holders to their entities much easier.
But again, this doesn't fix the financial disclosure problem..
I agree. The real benefit here will be a more coherent and digestible understanding these entities and their relationships, such that other actions can build off it. Using this data itself to litigate is a non-starter.
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.
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.
Bankers don't really care about fines. Sure $16B here or there hurts, but as long as no one goes to jail most of those losses are absorbed by shareholders. Top management already got their bonuses.
I've seen some argue that the sheer volume and complexity of financial law actually makes it easier for bankers to find loop-holes and insulate themselves. I'm not familiar enough to truly judge the truth in that theory.
I'm positive banks here in Spain were doing illegal stuff. And most likely still are if you ask me.
Just google about the very recent case of Rodrigo Rato and Bankia. That man was our Minister for Economy for 8 years and also head of the FMI for a smaller period. Bankia faked its own accounts prior stock listing at IBEX, among other beautys. It's a comic read if you are into that kind of stuff.
I understand what you ment, it just doesn't apply here. In fact, i think there is a market with reclamations to banks on behalf of clients.
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.
In reality, the swap data repositories are finding the data submitted by each institution very difficult to reconcile - it's a step in the right direction but the goal of constructing a full representation of each financial institution's derivatives exposure is still a way off.
Not knowing about what would be required to model these full representations, is it just a typical "too much data, not enough data scientists" problem, or are there fundamental research questions to be answered here? For that matter, does the SEC even employ or contract/grant big-data researchers for these types of problems? It seems like it's exactly the type of problem that a government research grant should be intended to solve!
Defining a swap: the OTC market is complex and there is no standard representation for many of the products - this makes reconciling data submitted by each of the firms complex. A simple interest rate swap report could contain up to 1,000 elements to fully describe a trade.
Volume: the 2 major OTC reporting regimes, Dodd-Frank and ESMA, both generate tens of millions of trade reports daily. This data needs to be correct; needs to be both ingested and retrieved quickly and needs to support complex post-reporting processing and queries.
Complex workflow: each swap undergoes many changes during it's lifetime, which complicates the workflow and data for reporting. For example, you may trade a block CDS, which is split into 20 allocations, some of which are new trades and some that alter existing trades (step ins; step outs; terminations; reductions...). Each of the allocations may require different reporting treatments.
And yes, the 'too much data, not enough scientists' problem with interpreting the submissions. Bear in mind that the SEC reporting hasn't started yet - that's 2015...
I am interested in "no-one" knew versus my (anecdotally limited) understanding of "well we the ratings agencies all knew we just were not allowed to tell by our bosses"
It seems the sub prime mortgage problem was an industry open secret, it's just that short of regulator action it was not clear what to do. And as we prosecuted nobody the next crises will have fewer whistleblowers.
But I am interested in what might be solutions to regulation - should global financial transparency be a goal? Should removing excess profit from banking be a goal?
True, but this project is mapping that public opaque surface and providing a foundation for examining other datasets.
Imagine if in the future there is leaked dataset. That can then be analyzed using the subsidiary and location information assembled here. Or to note what the public financial statements were and to notice anomalies compared to the leaked dataset.
Its really about keeping track of who all the players in the game are and tracing connections between them.
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.
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.
> 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.
This doesn't directly address your question, but the "financialization" [0] of the economy has gotten us to the point where 9% of GDP (as of 2012) is consumed by the finance sector [1].
It's certainly conceivable that the risk management Wall Street provides has led to economic growth, but considering the systemic instability that led to the 2008 crash, I take that claim with a grain of salt.
LIBOR manipulation (which many banks confessed to), FOREX manipulation (ongoing scandal), Goldman's Aluminum debacle and other commodity rigging.
These are just the ones I'm familiar with. I believe it's 80-20. 20% of banks profits are rent-seeking behavior. If we compare this with megacorps in general I'm sure some of their bottom-line is also from rent-seeking behavior.
Edit: additional thought: Rent-seeking is child's play when you consider too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-jail.
> Any entities that earn undeserved profits (and some will argue many financial institutions fall under this umbrella)
Some people will argue for just about any absurd personal opinion. It doesn't mean it's correct or that it has any merit.
> 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.
Even if this is true so what? What's your point? A lot of businesses don't contribute to productivity nor do they need to.
Not so fast. Banks are in positions of trust which are easy to abuse. That is a different animal than some ex-im guy selling widgets at a huge market to people who don't know better. Not onlly are they in positions to exploit their delegated trust in the information flow of major economies, they are also in positions that allow them to exploit both their data and verious mechanisms of market micro-structure through the revolving door relationship with the regulatory infrastructure. In other words, nobody outside of finance really has a clue about how to regulate a bank...and 9/10 bankers barely have a clue about anything in the bank that they don't directly deal with. This limits the amount of people that are feasible to regulate these banks. Which means that being a senior executive is in an of itself a pathway to exploit this type of second derivative opportunity that comes from holding onto a scarce commodity that is on the one hand in high demand by the enforcemnet patrons in government, and on the other hand, can be exploited in and of its own right through various commercial channels both legitimate and less so.
Well, banks are earning money, and if it ends up this money is essentially just a "gift" to banks from the rest of us in society, that's a problem.
If you object and say "but they deserve these profits!" then you're arguing that they are contributing to productivity (and then the profits would be fine)
The only reason people think that banks profits are undeserved in comparison to the other industries, is because people don't care to understand banking.
If you take, for example, pharmaceuticals or the food industry, you'd find a lot more f'ed up things, with people massively taken for a ride. But apparently it's not hip to hate on those industries yet.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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].
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.
The site fails to achieve the goal of enticing contribution - the only option to actually contribute is a link to the 'missions' page that has only a single mission regarding Bolivia that doesn't interest me at all.
Furthermore, dedicated crawler isn't needed in many smaller (or more centralised/regulated?) markets where there are only a few players. E.g. in Latvia there are less than 30 credit institutions, and as the published data is freeform, not machine readable (http://fktk.lv/en/market/credit_institutions/banks1/ etc), then simply copy/pasting the info would be much quicker than testing a scraper.
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]
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.
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)
can you explain more about how you want "coders" to do "missions", but you're charging 20k/yr for access to part of the data, and you have an obnoxiously low rate limit? are you bloomberg? I think we should all stick with quandl for now. But seriously though, it's disingenuous to brand yourself as "open data" but not offer bulk downloads and a realistic API limit.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree with addressing the "too big to fail" pain point, and I think a conceptual map to help with that ought to include:
* industry players & interactions
* political donations
* relationships between corporate executives, K street (lobbyists), congress critters, legislative staffers, interns
* relationships between regulatory agency executives, K street, congress critters, legislative staffers, interns
* former (and potential) primary candidates in the congress critters' districts
* a scatterplot of how a given congress critter voted on various related issues, as well as which of their votes (related or not) are out of sync with the voters in their district
Now that's a useful tool right there. Probably a pipe dream ... ah well.
* 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?
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.
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.
[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 -- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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:
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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), 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.
[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.
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.