We were engaged by a large North American company with a global footprint to help with their Mexico security strategy. This client has several critical sites in country, and our team worked to provide them with an assessment of the security landscape in Mexico, with a particular focus on the changing kidnap and ransom (K&R) environment. On a global scale, individual K&R datasets may not accurately capture the actual situation on the ground. Acknowledging this gap, a multi-pronged approach to intelligence gathering for this project was preferable than relying solely on this or other open source data. We started by coordinating with our in-country experts, and utilised on-the-ground human sources, national statistics, government data and local reporting. We then overlaid this with our own intelligence gleamed from open and closed sources along with very granular data from social-media analytics to provide a to create a comprehensive dataset of K&R incidents in Mexico spanning more than a decade.

Using this dataset and several of our tools, including the platform, Cascade, we mapped the data against the client's key sites of interest to identify the high-risk and low-risk sites from a security perspective. Using the intelligence gathered by our in-country expert, we also outlined how K&R incidents have changed over time, why these changes have taken place and forecast what the future impacts and scenarios could be. Since our initial assessment, we have continued to proactively monitor the client's key sites using geo-fencing technology and real-time intelligence to alert them of any notable incidents as they happen.