Launching “Map the Banks” campaign to map the global financial industry

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Map the Banks – possibly first ever global sprint to scrape a single class of data from every jurisdiction in the world. For this campaign, we are focussing on how the financial industry is licenced to operate.

The financial crisis cost the world 4 trillion dollars. Before we can disrupt the industry, we need to map it. The financial crisis revealed the damage done by our lack of understanding of the influence and size of banks and financial companies. We no longer want to be in the dark. Citizens and regulators have to take control back by having open and free access to this information. We are taking up the challenge of collecting every banking and financial licence in the world so we can work towards a better banking system, that works for the good of society. We’re joined in this mission by Civio, OpenNorth & many more… (Interested in being a partner? Email us!)

Collecting this data could answer questions like:

• 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?

WHAT KIND OF LICENSES ARE WE COLLECTING?
To see a live feed of what datasets are being scraped, you can go to Map the Banks website, where we’ve got a global target to scrape 267 datasets. You can follow progress by looking at the jurisdictions shaded in white; the orange ones have not yet  been started. As you can see, at the time of writing we’ve already scraped 93, 316 licenses!  At the bottom, you can see what kind of licenses we’re trying to scrape which includes Consumer Credit, Debt Collection, Banks and Insurers. Clicking on regions will show the progress of licenses as the campaign continues.

HOW TO GET INVOLVED
We need your help to accomplish this.

Are you a Coder? Sign up to missions and help us by writing a bot.
Are you a policy expert or journalist? Once we have scraped more datasets, you can examine the data to find patterns & insights. Email hera@opencorporates.com to be on the mailing list.
Are you an NGO or think tank who wants to join forces with us to spread the word or host a #FlashHacks event? Give us a shout on hera@opencorporates.com.
Attend a #FlashHacks event to find out more! Sign up for the newsletter.
Spread the word. Tweet about the campaign! Here are some sample tweets, facebook and newletter blurb you can use.