Cerved exposes financial networks with Linkurious

Discover our user stories and learn about the challenges they overcame with Linkurious solutions. In this post we explain how the Cerved team developed a graph-based web-application using Linkurious JS library Ogma to visualize business networks.

Cerved is the Italian data-driven company. It gives businesses and institutions the data to guide their decisions, the tools to understand it and a team of people to turn it into action.

They provide credit information, marketing and credit management services, as well as counting one of the leading European rating agencies within their group. They help their clients manage risk, and opportunities arising from their business relations, assess their partners’ financial profile and their reliability.

Within the group, the Innovation and Data department is in charge of imagining new solutions and services. They work to deliver advanced capabilities to connect businesses to the knowledge and information they need.

Cerved provides its clients with a collection of information regarding the Italian business network, representing more than 6 million companies. These resources, ranging from financial statements to rating analytics, represent gigabytes of data stored in a variety of formats (PDF files, spreadsheet reports, etc…).

The overall size of the datasets, the variety of files and the necessity of helping users quickly analyze connections between information represents a few of the hurdles faced by Cerved’s Innovation and Data team.

Instigated by the requirement of providing their clients with a dynamic way to access and exploit connected data, Cerved’s Innovation team developed Graph4you, a graph-based visualization application.

The team needed an accessible graph visualization JavaScript library to quickly create a minimum viable product of their web-application. The library had to come with advanced features to fit Cerved data specificity and client’s needs such as various layout algorithms, node clustering and the possibility to export the data.

In a few weeks the team had a viable application available for a handful of their biggest customers to try, along with fifty internal associates using it for research purposes.

Today, Graph4you users can investigate a network composed of 30 million of nodes and 60 million of edges stored in a Neo4j graph database. They can query and navigate through the Italian business network to discover connections between entities or get the corporate linkages of companies and individual.

With Graph4you, the Innovation and Data team developed a solution strengthening the value of Cerved data resources. They provided the company and their clients with an intuitive tool to visualize business network and understand the connections within the data, allowing them to easily assess critical insights for compliance with AML regulations and risks assessments.

With Linkurious, the team reported a faster go-to-market process. In a few weeks, they managed to deliver a tailored graph application capable of handling large volumes of connected data and answering Cerved’s clients needs.