THIRD PARTY RISK

Designing a way for users to immediately see deeply hidden risks & criminal associates

Challenge

Detecting and preventing partnerships and procurement with debarred, sanctioned or criminal actors is an incredibly complex analytic challenge. Customers could assess the information reportred to them, but not see deeper into shell companies, relatives and associates. Since hiding a debarred or criminal controlling party is as easy as starting a shell company, investigators and procurment officers needed to uncover those degrees of hiding in a way that made immediate sense to end users.

Action

Based on extensive user research with customers and sales, I worked with engineers and product owners to repurpose existing technology. I incorporated both criminal data and the federal SAM debarrment list directly into a massive graph database.

After only six Agile sprints, we pushed a new visual analytics tool highlighting the riskiest business families, showing concrete risks out to degrees of seperation the user previously did not even know existed.

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Result

Users could automatically find the riskiest vendors based on the their entire business and personal relationships - not just reported data.

For example, one state human services agency can now immediately find highly risky food stamp and welfare retailers with prior debarments who are operating one or more degrees removed.

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