DataWalk
Intelligence Analysis software provider leverages the power of OpenText™ Analytics Database to boost clients’ investigative skills and reduce business risk
About DataWalk
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Number of patents:12–15 (USPTO and European Patent Office)
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Industry focus:Banking, insurance, law enforcement
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Use cases:Fraud detection, compliance
Summary
Challenges
- Clients must meet regulatory requirements and protect against evolving cyber threats.
- Wanted to integrate data sources for a unified view.
- Had to process complex queries against massive datasets.
Solution
- Delivered scalability, flexibility, and high performance.
- Enhanced efficiency with advanced native integration.
- Connected many data sources to create new contextual insight.
Results
Managing 80 million documents efficiently
Digitizing one million documents per year in store
Boosted staff productivity with digital workflows
Enabled effective international collaboration
Challenges
- Wanted to introduce flexible intelligence analysis capabilities to visualize hidden patterns and connections in data from many sources
- Sought to provide real-time data transparency to comply with stricter regulatory requirements and protect against sophisticated cyber threats
DataWalk developed its business in response to a myriad of challenges its clients encountered as the world changed and organizations faced evolving and sophisticated threats. Many organizations are bound by strict regulatory requirements, and this can be hard to manage. Regulatory scrutiny demands accuracy, but traditional systems often fail to provide a unified view of data, leading to false positives, high compliance costs, and impeded investigations. DataWalk’s mission is to combat fraud and solve previously intractable data problems. It holds 12–15 global patents for advanced push-down computations and graph algorithms. Companies come to DataWalk looking for flexible intelligence analysis capabilities.
DataWalk’s CTO Krystian Piecko explained, "Our clients typically span banking, defense, government, insurance, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement. Developments in these areas have moved at lightning speed and our clients want to take advantage of new technologies, such as generative AI, but cannot afford to get it wrong as the impact of inaccurate results is too far-reaching for them. Similarly, many of our clients are involved in cryptocurrency investigations. To be effective in this field, they need to integrate diverse investigative tools and cryptocurrency data with databases of known entities, along with traditional data sources such as interrogation protocols, police and national registries, the darknet, OSINT, and more. Our clients struggle with massive data volumes and complex queries. We often encounter scepticism as clients were promised results by other vendors who didn’t deliver. This is where DataWalk comes in."
Because DataWalk processes vast datasets from multiple sources, it needed an engine that could rapidly process complex queries. At the same time, it needed advanced integration capabilities to combine multiple technologies into a single horizontal platform so it could capture data and create intuitive knowledge-graphs to visualize hidden patterns and connections.
With OpenText Analytics Database, our clients can now ask the right questions and get immediate answers, enabling real-time business decisions and unparalleled investigative capabilities. It enables them to manage high-performance data analytics against massive data sets more cost-effectively than other solutions we considered.
Solution
DataWalk embedded OpenText™ Analytics Database (Vertica) to gain a competitive advantage. They revolutionized fraud investigations with a 360° contextual profile, user-friendly visualization, and seamless treatment of structured and unstructured content.
Products deployed
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OpenText™ Analytics Database (Vertica)
Analyze massive data sets with minimal compute and storage
Delivering scalability, deployment flexibility, and high-performance
With a comprehensive requirement list, DataWalk did market research to find the best data analytics engine. The team chose OpenText Analytics Database for its unique strengths. Piecko said, "We appreciated in-database computation and managing queries at the database level, which reduced delays and costs for large datasets. It was clear the platform was built to scale with data demands, adapting to various workloads while minimizing processing costs. We needed the ability to support billions of nodes and relationships for knowledge graph insights, and OpenText Analytics Database was the clear choice."
Piecko added, "By embedding OpenText Analytics Database, we gained a true competitive advantage. Graph databases excel where relationships matter, making them ideal for certain use cases compared to traditional relational databases. This leverages OpenText Analytics Database’s strengths."
DataWalk also valued OpenText’s flexible deployment options, recognizing cloud computing as the future for efficiency and cost savings, while acknowledging some industries still require on-premises solutions for security reasons. Overall, the long-term benefits of cloud computing make it a preferable choice.
Enhancing efficiency with advanced native integration
OpenText Analytics Database supports graph algorithms essential to the value DataWalk delivers, along with vector search and reverse index search directly within its engine. It embeds seamlessly with custom applications through APIs and developer toolsets. Piecko said, "OpenText Analytics Database helped us integrate data from multiple sources into a single repository, enhancing the efficiency of data analysis."
Using its native capabilities, DataWalk goes beyond stand-alone graph databases, providing multiple graph analytics features. No programming expertise is required, and queries can be done visually or via API. DataWalk’s built-in capability to integrate data from external sources requires no additional software. Unstructured data, like images and PDFs, can be stored and linked. Data cleaning and transformation are included, negating the need for separate extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools.
Connecting many data sources to create new contextual insight
With OpenText Analytics Database, DataWalk solves the challenge of analyzing connected big data for numerous use cases. Many clients combat insurance, medical, retail, or election fraud.
Powered by OpenText Analytics Database, DataWalk revolutionizes fraud investigations by pre-connecting data, enabling a 360-degree real-time profile of any person or claim. By using the DataWalk Knowledge Graph Engine, users can easily visualize data and analyze relationships with powerful link-analysis and graph algorithms.
For organizations interested in large language models (LLMs), DataWalk’s graph AI integration layer can augment an LLM with structured and unstructured data, enabling reliable answers to organization-specific questions. The AI platform unifies data from disparate systems into a clean, normalized knowledge graph.
Traditional know your customer (KYC) intelligence often relied on manual methods, yielding insufficient insights. DataWalk takes a holistic approach by unifying internal data with dozens of external sources to uncover contextual profiles and networks, revealing associated risk. Understanding connections and relationships brings new capabilities for evaluating risk.
By embedding OpenText Analytics Database, we gained a true competitive advantage. Graph databases excel where relationships matter, making them ideal for certain use cases compared to traditional relational databases. This leverages OpenText Analytics Database’s strengths.
Results
DataWalk can process queries dramatically faster at the database level—without disrupting operations or moving data—giving clients actionable intelligence in a cost-effective manner. This directly supports regulation compliance and reduces business risk.
Enhanced data-driven decision-making
Whereas traditional solutions were unable to handle the scale, complexity, and performance requirements of advanced data analytics to meet today’s challenges, OpenText Analytics Database supported DataWalk clients with in-database computation and push-down functions, providing up to 10 times improvement over other market alternatives—no technical expertise required. Clients’ business users can perform complex queries with DataWalk’s ontology-driven interface.
DataWalk's A-shaped architecture optimizes data processing by bringing computation closer to the data, offering a scalable, cost-effective, and agile solution for enterprises. Scalable graph algorithms, infinite data traversals, intelligent searches, and machine learning all run against massive data sets without the need for any data movement.
The visual and user-friendly interface made it easy to break down data siloes and provide a unified, holistic view—incorporating automatically interconnected intuitive objects, such as people, transactions, or events. This helps users uncover complex relationships, patterns, and anomalies within huge data sets, leading to more informed decision-making and reduced business risk.
Demonstrated client success and cost savings
Leveraging the power of OpenText Analytics Database, DataWalk helped uncover a child exploitation ring by giving law enforcement the data and visualization needed for immediate action.
A DataWalk banking client integrated its different lines of business within just four months, significantly improving fraud prevention. DataWalk’s agile approach supported the refinement of questions and real-time decisions. The resulting integration and insights streamlined operations, yielding weekly cost savings of $1.5 million and better decision-making.
Another well-known bank partnered with DataWalk to create a comprehensive methodology for enhancing its KYC process. The bank needed to fulfill compliance requirements and understand customer behavior for more accurate risk assessments. Regulators gave it six months to design and implement the entire solution.
Using DataWalk, the bank fully automated continuous customer behavior monitoring to meet regulatory requirements by the deadline. Based on this success, it now considers using DataWalk for other financial crime scenarios, such as holistic customer scoring and fraud detection, where real-time insight is crucial.
Accelerated investigation with actionable intelligence
With OpenText Analytics Database at its core, DataWalk can instantly transform siloed data into a 360-degree contextual profile of any data element. This enables DataWalk clients to easily connect new data and create or modify connections without disrupting operations. They can quickly generate actionable intelligence from vast amounts of disparate data across multiple sources, dramatically accelerating investigations.
Piecko concluded, "With OpenText Analytics Database, our clients can now ask the right questions and get immediate answers, enabling real-time business decisions and unparalleled investigative capabilities. It enables them to manage high-performance data analytics against massive data sets more cost-effectively than other solutions we considered. We can clearly see OpenText’s ongoing investment in its database analytics portfolio, which makes us feel confident about our partnership."
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