We talk often with our contacts in finance and intelligence, and an increasingly common subject is the U.S. Government’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP — part of the Treasury Department). Our friends see the large problems facing the TARP and the Federal Reserve, and have been asking how our technology can help.
Some of the problems are out of our hands, but many others are solvable with the proper analytics. Taking a closer look at the task before TARP, we noticed that many challenges mirror those facing the intelligence community:
The data used to create this video is primarily synthetic – to show how Palantir could be used to implement this analytic workflow — and contains no personally identifiable information (PII).
- Entity and relationship data is scattered across many sources in a wide variety of formats; some are structured, some are unstructured.
- Entity structure and relationships are not always known upfront, so the solution must adapt to new data structures on the fly.
- It is costly, time-consuming, and unnecessary to impose one structure on the entire industry.
- Scalability is a must: millions of mortgages have been securitized into hundreds of thousands of entities.
- Sensitive, private data requires sophisticated access control and knowledge management — understanding who is accessing which data, what the organization knows, when it was known, and how it was discovered.
- Specialists from different fields and geographical regions must be able to collaborate effectively.
Palantir’s technology already solves these problems for the intelligence community. Our dynamic ontology makes it easy to import TARP data and entities, so we’ve created a short video using Palantir that shows the power of our approach. We analyze individual mortgage loans, mortgage-backed securities comprising these loans, and institutions holding tranches of the securities:
For more detail on the similarities, click the link to see a detailed breakdown of intelligence vs. TARP workflows.
Workflows
The types of questions the TARP and the Federal Reserve need to answer successfully are similar to those in the intelligence community. In essence, TARP is performing the sort of analysis performed at intelligence agencies: making sense of large amounts of data to create a coherent and accurate picture of the world. TARP is performing analysis on domestic financial data rather than global intelligence data, and using those insights to craft solutions to the current financial crisis. Our breakdown and comparison of the different aspects of the workflows along the same broad lines looks like this:
Strategic: Mission Planning and Policy Design
| Classical Intel | TARP |
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Operational: Asset Class Level Management and Tactical Planning
| Classical Intel | TARP |
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Tactical: Asset Targeting, Program Implementation, Specific Action Support.
| Classical Intel | TARP |
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Mission
We believe that the TARP’s success is critical to the global financial markets and the health of our nation. We’ve said from the beginning that our mission is to change the way the world approaches data, and today Palantir is a technology leader in both intelligence and finance. As we begin work on this new challenge we’re excited to be making a difference where it’s needed most.