🚨 Risky Business: The Rise of Geopolitical Data & Analytics - Asymmetrix Newsletter #75
Data & Analytics businesses are more valuable than consulting businesses.
Today’s post has been guest-written by our summer intern, Nina Brandler, in her final year at the London School of Economics studying BSc International Relations & History.
Nina has concentrated today on Geopolitical Risk Data & Analytics, with a focus on the shift taking place from qualitative information to quantitative data.
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🚨 The evolution of Geopolitical Risk from Consulting to Data
Gillian Tett recently wrote that we are entering a "new age of geoeconomics", where economic tools like trade policy and sanctions have become key instruments of state power. This shift isn’t just reshaping global politics, it’s fundamentally changing how companies identify and manage risk.
Geopolitical intelligence, once confined to expert-written reports, is now evolving into structured data that integrates directly with business systems and informs decisions in real-time.
Over the past decade, geopolitical risk has become one of the most economically disruptive forces. Wars, sanctions, trade disputes, and political instability have cost billions in direct and indirect impacts.
In a world where shipping lanes can be rerouted overnight and sanctions issued with little warning, risk moves faster than traditional analysis can keep up.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to at least $40.2bn in aggregate losses and damages to Ukraine’s agriculture sector, significantly disrupting global food markets. Attacks in the Red Sea have diverted up to 75% of regional vessel traffic, reshaping shipping lanes. Meanwhile, the USA’s Reciprocal Tariffs are intensifying trade tensions and complicating supply chains, leading to higher costs for businesses and consumers worldwide.
These aren’t isolated shocks. They represent a structural shift in global risk that increasingly requires faster, more systematic, and scalable responses. Consequently, geopolitical intelligence is evolving from static reports into structured, machine-readable data.
This transition is already reshaping a sizeable market. The broader global risk analytics market was valued at approximately $40bn in 2023, and is projected to reach over $90bn by 2030. This surge reflects a clear shift in demand from traditional geopolitical consulting towards scalable data feeds and integrated workflows. Companies like Dragonfly Intelligence, Kharon, and recently Helio Intelligence, are leading this transformation.
This matters because for decades, geopolitical intelligence existed outside the boundaries of analytics systems - too bespoke to scale, too abstract to model. As a result, these businesses tended to be consultancies, providing one-off project-based client work.
That’s now changing as political risk is being reformatted as a structured data product, engineered to feed directly into models and risk engines. This shift doesn’t just change how geopolitical knowledge is accessed, it changes who it’s for.
Traditionally, geopolitical insight was built for people with authority, such as policymakers or boardroom clients. The distribution model was memo-driven, and the value was in the synthesis. Now, however, an increasing number of clients are looking for compatibility. Compliance teams need exposure layers that react to sanctions in real-time; macro traders want signal feeds that adjust models as geopolitical pressure builds; and logistics platforms want dynamic routing based on conflict probability. The priority isn’t interpretation, it’s integration.
This is why the deals that may seem like bolt-ons are arguably infrastructure bets. When Dow Jones acquired Dragonfly Intelligence and Oxford Analytica for $40m earlier this year, it wasn’t just to expand their editorial coverage, it was to embed geopolitical signals directly into the systems that businesses rely on for decision making.
Oxford Economics’ acquisition of Alpine Macro went beyond client expansion, by integrating geopolitical scenarios into the macroeconomic forecasting models used by investors and policymakers.
Meanwhile, Helio Intelligence’s recent acquisition of Dods’ EU monitoring business reflected a similar shift, turning regulatory information into structured datasets for real-time policy monitoring.
What these deals have in common isn’t the content, but the format. Across the board, geopolitical information is being repositioned, not as standalone output, but as structured input, designed to flow into larger analytical systems.
This isn’t a simple shift - geopolitical data is messy and nonlinear. But for large institutions trying to price political volatility, ambiguity isn’t a reason to opt out, it’s a reason to model. The tools to help with this already exist, as data such as satellite imagery or vessel tracking are all timestamped and geolocated. What’s still to come though is the software to transform all of this.
As geopolitics becomes increasingly machine-readable, it starts to resemble other dynamic data layers like weather patterns, shipping flows, or interest rates. While geopolitical risk isn’t fully tradeable yet, it is increasingly being priced into markets, influencing freight rates, insurance premiums, and overall supply chain strategies.
As a result, geopolitical providers that have made the shift from consulting to Data & Analytics (or the small number of recently founded pure Data & Analytics geopolitical businesses) are valued according to higher Data & Analytics multiples. For founders and investors, transitioning away from pure consulting is a no-brainer.
Structured geopolitical data doesn’t replace human judgment, it complements it. While data enables scale and speed, expert interpretation remains essential for understanding ambiguity and context that models alone can’t reliably capture.
This isn't a clean shift from people to systems. The events being modelled are often unique, and qualitative insight still plays a critical role. Yet the economic value is moving, from bespoke interpretation to intelligence that can integrate seamlessly into broader software systems.
This shift from consulting to data will be resisted, as expertise is hard-won, and formatting geopolitical risk for AI will be difficult. But commercial incentives are hard to ignore, and the buyers - and their expectations - are changing. They don’t want just reports, they want inputs that move with them.
Geopolitics isn’t just something to be interpreted anymore. It’s something to be integrated.
📧 If you would like to talk, please email us at a.boden@asymmetrixintelligence.com