Methodology
The Geostrategic Risk Intelligence Methodology
Fortius Intel is built on a simple premise: geopolitical risk intelligence is only as good as the data it draws from and the discipline applied to interpreting it. This page sets out both, in full, because a methodology your board cannot interrogate is not one it should trust.
Intelligence pipeline
Data Sources
The geostrategic data sources behind every brief
Every Threat Register and Intelligence Brief is generated at query time against live sources, not a static library refreshed on a schedule. The standing source set spans three parallel intelligence streams.
Sector baseline
GDELT DOC 2.0 sector policy and regulatory queries. Reuters, Hellenic Shipping, DefenseNews, MIT Tech Review, and sector wire services. OFAC SDN, EU Official Journal, Federal Register, BSEE, CISA, DDTC, BIS Entity List.
Security & conflict layer
Dual geographic security queries, country-level and regional, covering kinetic conflict, terrorism, piracy, civil unrest, and sector-specific corporate security events. Conflict RSS feeds including BBC World, Al Jazeera, Reuters World, War on the Rocks.
Topic-specific intelligence
For Intelligence Briefs, a dedicated AI node generates targeted search queries for your exact topic and geography, not a static keyword list. Your specific query drives the intelligence retrieved, producing results that generic sector feeds cannot surface.
The Analytical Methodology
The geostrategic analytical methodology
The interpretive layer on top of that data is a HUMINT-trained framework applied to open-source material, not an open-source research process trying to sound like intelligence. Fortius's founding analysts come from Special Forces and counter-terrorism investigative backgrounds, where the standard for a usable assessment is the same regardless of whether the underlying source is a classified report or a public regulatory filing: name the actor, state what is demonstrated versus inferred, and say plainly how confident you are and why.
That standard is applied through two calibrated scores attached to every entry.
CRITICAL · HIGH · MEDIUM · LOW
Measures operational consequence to the specific company and footprint in question, not how prominently an event is covered in the news cycle. Severity and confidence are assigned separately: a CRITICAL rating does not require HIGH confidence to be actioned.
HIGH · MEDIUM · LOW
Measures source quality and corroboration independently of severity. A LOW-confidence CRITICAL threat is flagged as an early warning worth watching, not suppressed for lacking certainty. A HIGH-confidence LOW-severity item is not inflated to seem more urgent than it is.
Every Intelligence Brief then carries a consequence chain: a 30-day direct effect with its trigger condition, a 90-day second-order effect, and a 180-day strategic decision environment, each stage naming the observable indicator that confirms the chain is activating. The chain is built from the same demonstrated-fact discipline as the rest of the brief, projecting forward from what has actually happened rather than speculating about what might.
Analyst Verified
What "analyst verified" means at each tier
Every brief on every tier runs through the same source retrieval, scoring, and consequence-chain construction described above. Analyst verification is a separate, additional layer: a human analyst reviews the output against the underlying sources before it is delivered, checking that the named actors, severity and confidence ratings, and consequence chain hold up to the same scrutiny a board would apply.
Monthly Forecast Report & Call
On the Scan tier, this takes the form of a monthly analyst-verified forecast report and call, checking that named actors, severity and confidence ratings, and consequence chains hold before any brief reaches you.
Weekly Forecast Report & Call · Quarterly Board Brief
On Command, it runs weekly, plus a quarterly board brief: the highest-frequency human review Fortius offers, built for organisations that need the analytical layer between raw data and the boardroom already standing and checked, not assembled and verified under deadline.
Sector Coverage
Intelligence built for four sectors
The methodology above is what every scan runs on, whether it is your first or your hundredth. The free tier does not give you a simplified version of the analysis, it gives you ten entries instead of a full Intelligence Brief. The source retrieval, the scoring discipline, the consequence chain structure: all of it runs the same way from the first scan.
Named actors. Calibrated scores. Consequence chain. In under 60 seconds.