Crime analysis software takes engineer from BT to the DEA

OF THE many new businesses concocted every year, about 90% fail, a handful make the world taste better, a smattering boost global sustainability efforts.

- Lucy Tobin

Very few entrepreneurs can say their start-up helps solve murders, finds missing people and progresses complex police investigations — but Joseph Hoy’s 10-year-old company, Forensic Analytics, does just that.

Job satisfaction, Hoy says, doesn’t come from big contracts but “from being told, ‘There’s a vulnerable person alive this morning who might not otherwise have been.’ Knowing that by using our software, customers can get answers more quickly, and bring explanations or closure to victims or relatives sooner, makes us immensely proud.”

Hoy, 54, started out as a telecoms engineer for mobile networks including BT. He moved into telecoms training, and in the early 2000s, became an expert witness on “cell site analysis”, or providing location evidence based on mobile phone billing data. This work helped solve murders, armed robberies, kidnaps and terrorism cases: “all the really horrible things,” the calm entrepreneur concedes. But every case Hoy worked on with his expert witness colleague, Martin Griffiths, faced delays because of the time it took to analyse the data. A multi-suspect, long-running fraud investigation would take an individual six months to process the data and turn evidence into a usable format. “Then one day in 2013, I thought ‘why don’t we develop a proper application to process the files?’”