What a Month in the Financial Sector! (original) (raw)

In my Advanced UML Tutorial so far, I have not shown any examples of object diagrams (except for composite structure diagrams, which are a special case of object diagrams).

To make us for that lacuna, I model a current hot topic using UML object diagrams.

This month has been one of tremendous flux and turbulence in the global financial sector. Lehman Brothers has gone under and been subsequently dismembered and sold to Barclays and Nomura Holdings. Merrill Lynch was snapped up by Bank of America. In Europe, a series of consolidations have happened without much fanfare.

Is it possible to depict who-acquired-who using UML?

First, I modeled the financial institutions using the following simple model:

Financial Sector Model

With this model in place, I proceeded to model each financial institution and indicate who-acquired-who by means of composition relationships. I further filled-in values for the attributes (capital raised, writedown & loss) in billions of US Dollars (data sourced from Bloomberg). Finally, I linked (in UML a link is an instance of an association) the acquiring companies to their appropriate region of primary ownership.

Here is the final result:

Financial Sector Acquisitions

Of course I can nest the acquired company inside the acquiring company, but that would look very like a composite structure diagram, which I have already covered elsewhere.