A disclosure tier tells you how transparent a company is. It doesn't tell you who's behind it.
One security from the OTC market, and the people-and-connection layer MARS resolves underneath it — the part no single filing shows. Illustrated on GBT Technologies (OTC: GTCH), one of ~18,000 OTC securities.
A reporting OTC issuer (CIK 1471781) — filings, financials, a disclosure tier. All the transparency signals an exchange operator provides. Answers: how much does this company disclose?
Every officer and director resolved to a canonical person — and each person's connections to other companies. Answers: who is behind it, and what else are they tied to?
GBT's board resolves to real people — and one of them, former U.S. Ambassador Ned L. Siegel, connects (per public filings) to 18 other companies: a string of speculative small-caps alongside legitimate public-service roles. That cross-company director pattern is invisible in GBT's own disclosure, and it's exactly the due-diligence signal a market operator wants surfaced.
Ned Siegel is a legitimate former ambassador who also sits on many small-company boards — nothing here asserts wrongdoing. What matters for a market operator is that MARS makes the cross-company network legible: a single board seat on GBT, resolved, opens onto eighteen other issuers. Some of those names carry their own histories. A disclosure tier scores each company alone; MARS scores the neighborhood.
OTC Markets' job is telling the market how transparent a security is — the OTCQX-to-Expert-Market ladder, the Caveat Emptor flags. That's a company-level, disclosure-level signal. MARS adds the orthogonal axis: who is behind the security, and what else they touch — the people, the interlocking boards, the connected shells, the insider events. It's the layer that's hardest to see on exactly the dark, disclosure-poor names where it matters most.
This is one security. The same resolution runs across the whole market — and it deepens automatically as more filings and news flow in. The disclosure tier and the identity graph are complementary, not competing — and together they answer the two questions an investor actually asks: how much does this company tell me, and who am I really dealing with?