Credit Suisse had no centralised way to track who actually owned what. Client data sat in spreadsheets, passed around by email, which meant relationship managers and compliance analysts were working from whatever version happened to be current that week. The platform started in shipping finance, where ownership structures are notoriously layered, holding companies registered across multiple jurisdictions, vessels owned by SPVs owned by other SPVs, and later expanded to cover aviation and real estate as the same problem showed up there too. For clients like this, the lack of a single source of truth was a real operational risk on portfolios worth tens of millions.

The trickier problem sat one layer down. The bank needed to know whether a Special Purpose Vehicle was owned by a person or by another entity. That distinction sounds small until something goes wrong, bankruptcy, dispute, regulatory review, and suddenly it's the only question that matters. The existing tools had no way to surface it clearly. You had to go digging.