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This is apparently only the first step.

> 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.

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Great example of this was the map they built that show links to subsidiaries and others: http://opencorporates.com/viz/financial

Ah, thanks. I did miss that indicator that this is only the first step.

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.

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