Moody's

ABOUT

Moody's Corporation is a leading global provider of credit ratings, research, and risk analysis.
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The company evaluates the creditworthiness of entities ranging from governments and corporations to complex financial products like structured finance instruments.

These ratings help investors assess risk, influencing borrowing costs and financial decision-making worldwide. By assigning credit ratings, Moody's plays a crucial role in maintaining transparency and stability in financial markets.

PROBLEM

A financial services firm needs to assess and display complex risk relationships within an organization. The data includes connections between individuals and entities, specifically focusing on sanctioned directors, entities with sanctions, and sanctions by association (e.g., subsidiaries or affiliates affected due to a parent organization's status).

The team struggles to find an intuitive and visually clear way to present these intricate connections to compliance officers and analysts.

SOLUTION

Senior UX Designer

@ Modus

Data Visualization

Prototype

How I joined the project

Upon joining a team that had been developing a risk visualization product for some time, I discovered they were exploring a wheel chart concept. This chart divided an organization's risk profile into segments representing various areas—such as sanctioned directors, entity relationships, and associated risks.

While the idea was promising, it was too focused on individual areas of risk and didn’t account for the available data showing deeper, interconnected relationships across multiple degrees of separation

I dove into the challenge, dubbing the effort "Reinventing the Wheel." My goal was to refine and expand their initial concept into a more insightful, layered visualization that could dynamically represent hidden and direct risks, ultimately making the data more actionable and intuitive for compliance teams.

Designing for clarity and comparison

My intention was to design a visual indicator that intuitively displayed different levels of risk data, making it easy to compare entities and recognize patterns at a glance.

I drew inspiration from familiar visual systems, such as car card games where each vehicle’s attributes are displayed in distinct categories, allowing for quick comparisons.

Similarly, I considered how computer games use bar indicators to convey complex stats—like health, power, or speed—in a format that's instantly understandable.

By applying these principles, I aimed to create a concise, layered display that simplifies the complexity of multi-level risk data, ensuring users could quickly assess and compare the depth of potential threats within an organization.

Initial ideas

Final mockups

To address the challenge of visualizing complex organizational risk, a custom visual indicator—the Risk Iceberg—is designed to show up to three degrees of separation from a sanctioned entity. This metaphorical design emphasizes the unseen depth of risks, similar to how much of an iceberg remains hidden underwater.

Within each layer, dots symbolize individual entities or individuals. The top layer shows the primary entity, while subsequent layers represent connections of increasing distance from the core.

Hovering over a dot reveals details about the entity, its sanction status, and its relationship path to the core entity.

Data visualization for navigation