Our mission is to empower people to interpret and improve the world around them.
We take this to heart—each quarter we dedicate a portion of the company’s time and resources toward projects aimed at making real social impact. We call them Data for Social Good. In the past, we’ve produced a number of DfSG projects that serve the public, such as Smoke Signals—an open source tool that helps communities determine which homes are at the highest risk of not having a smoke alarm.
For the past few months, our focus has been on human trafficking and the ways in which data and technology can help end the global crisis. Public data, in particular, can provide valuable insights into trafficking trends.
Polaris—a nonprofit that works to combat and prevent modern slavery—estimates human trafficking enslaves 40.3 million people worldwide, with more than 10,000 victims last year in the U.S.
It’s a crisis as well as big business, raking in $150 billion worldwide each year for traffickers. This money flows through the global economy, including through American banks. Financial institutions in the U.S. are committed to addressing this crime and have anti-trafficking strategies in place, but cross-institution communication is challenging and it’s difficult to identify the criminals and share knowledge across the industry. As a result, human trafficking continues to thrive.
Enigma is working on a resource to make this kind of collaboration between financial institutions easier. Partnering with ACAMS and Polaris, as well as other organizations in the space, Enigma is founding Standing Together Against Trafficking (STAT). STAT is a technology platform aimed at helping financial institutions stay up-to-date and informed about trafficking indicators. STAT will help facilitate and enrich the sharing of typologies by organizing and mapping them for financial crime professionals. This will be an opportunity for financial institutions to not only be in communication with one another, but also alert each other to discoveries in real time.
We’re excited by the potential of this project to help move the dial in the fight against trafficking.
As we work on the platform, we also wanted to share some of the research and guidelines we’ve come across while preparing for this project. We discovered that many anti-trafficking resources are scattered across organizations and difficult to find in one place. Since STAT will be behind a firewall (in order to keep information secure), we pulled together these resources to make the information we found both easily discoverable and digestible.
Today, we’re excited to launch a resource microsite for financial services professionals fighting human trafficking. We hope this will serve as a central hub for those seeking guidance on anti-trafficking efforts, and move us all one step closer towards ending modern slavery.
Want to use data for good? We’re growing our team—join us.
