Financial Cartography
FNA Papers Series
By Dr Kimmo Soramäki
Geographic maps have historically guided military, political, and economic strategy; however, modern digitalization and globalization render them insufficient for tracking borderless threats such as distributed cyber attacks, supply chain disruptions, and rapid financial market shifts. The freezing of credit markets during the last financial crisis and the uncertainty of Brexit highlighted a critical lack of understanding regarding global financial interdependencies. To address this gap, this paper proposes a large-scale "Financial Cartography" initiative.
Financial cartography replaces geographic proximity with logical proximity—such as financial interdependence, shared portfolio characteristics, or the magnitude of transaction flows—to model complex "big data" sets. By filtering out noise and highlighting salient features, these maps increase information bandwidth and facilitate rapid decision-making across business, government, and military domains. The proposed research agenda outlines three foundational areas of mapping:
Trade Networks: To understand the tangled interactions of global supply chains and measure the impact of economic shocks.
Financial Markets: To apply complexity reduction techniques that provide systemic, time-varying views of global markets and detect anomalies.
Financial Market Infrastructures (FMIs): To map the critical interconnections between payment systems and exchanges, modeling systemic vulnerabilities to operational failures and state-sponsored cyber attacks.
Ultimately, the development of unified financial maps will enable policymakers, regulators, and business leaders to monitor global stability, protect critical infrastructure, and proactively manage the interconnected risks of a hyperconnected world.
