How Does Location Intelligence Benefit BFSI Companies?

Do these scenarios sound familiar to your business operations? 

• What is the distance between the branch office/ATM from the customer’s residence/office? 
• Are field service agents making enough right calls in their territory? 
• What is the current status of the moving cash services? 
• Are loan verification processes happening at the right customer location? 
• How do you improve the sales productivity of the workforce?  
• Are the ads displayed based on where customers are standing?
• Are location-based personalized offers made at the right time?  

The Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI) struggles to deal with siloed information from vast streams of datasets. This siloed data makes it more challenging to answer these questions. Location intelligence provides answers for a variety of questions like these and helps solve challenges arising from it. 

What is Location intelligence or location analytics?

Location intelligence is the process of leveraging location data from any event or activity. These events can be consumer behavior, Internet of Things (IoT) data sources, environmental factors, etc. It helps in seeing trends and patterns that are otherwise impossible to detect with visualization and traditional analytics.  

Location intelligence is a crucial component for businesses that run their operations across different geographies or multiple locations. It makes strategic decisions more effective for various business opportunities. 

Why do BFSI companies use location intelligence? 

• To manage their business risks efficiently
• Improve their overall customer experience
• Enhance their data quality 
• Maximize their operational efficiency 
• Increase their expansion planning and customer analytics ability 
• Coordinate their business processes smoothly and effectively  

How location intelligence benefits Banking and the Financial Services Industry (BFSI)

Location-enabled dataset is an asset for the BFSI industry as location-based business decisions are at its core. With a large amount of data revolving around customer behavior, location analytics provides vital information to understand their target audience better.

Using location intelligence, BFSI companies can manage their branch networks, merchants, understand their competition and regulators. Overall, it offers better insights for potential market discovery and helps them make informed decisions in their business operations.  Here is a list of benefits that location intelligence offers to the BFSI industry. 

Prioritize financial products and services 

The biggest responsibility for BFSI companies is to optimize their services and offerings to both physical touchpoints and digital touchpoints. They need to rightly allocate their service offerings and distribute them in physical retail outlets and digital channels. Some mistakes in allocating the service offerings can lead to huge losses.

Location intelligence comes in handy to prioritize service offerings to customers through digital channels and physical outlets. It enables businesses to direct their resources to lower-value and lower-cost channels like digital and mobile channels.

For instance: In high net worth areas, customers want a personal banker to discuss investment, savings, and pension plans. If customers are from rural areas and demand high-volume check-cashing services, a kiosk that allows them to walk in and dial a personal banker is more than enough.

With accurate insights from location intelligence, BFSI companies can develop highly-tailored financial products that are tied to customer demographics. It enables them to identify the training needs and staffing skills for each of their branches required to meet new market potential.

Identify market gaps and reduce footprint  

Location intelligence data enables BFSI businesses to understand demand, supply, and competition that impact their profit and performance. It helps them to identify market gaps and underserved markets that can maximize profitability, thereby improving financial performance.

With location intelligence technology, banks can reduce the footprint in their branches (money paid to a technology vendor to support a particular application). This act of reducing footprint helps them grow their market share and maintain customer loyalty.

Site selection for retail locations

It is necessary for BFSI companies to have a fuller picture of their customers before placing their branch locations. The location of branches for financial or banking institutions affects their staffing, sales, and profitability targets. Area-wise data is necessary to analyze the advantages and profiles of customers and boost their branch business. 

Location Intelligence provides accurate analytical insights of one location over the other. It gives BFSI companies a complete market understanding that helps them provide the right services at the right time and the right place for everyone. With relevant contextual location data, it helps them find out retail locations that can best serve their customer needs.

Effective monitoring of field executives

The biggest challenge for the BFSI companies is to manage the large field workforce. Field executives must submit job completion, proof of visit, and should even take customer feedback. In all these cases, field service automation software becomes highly beneficial.

A field service workforce automation software enables managers in financial institutions to monitor the daily operations of field agents like managing expenses, attendance logs, etc. It helps them effectively make real-time job allocation to the field agents based on numerous parameters like priority, skillset, distance, and time.

Fraud detection 

In this age of digital revolution, banking and financial frauds have increased manifold. Also, the frauds related to income, property, and sales tax have multiplied and become more complex. Without location intelligence, it is impossible to detect these frauds and rectify them. 

Location intelligence matches the purchase location and current location of the customer. If the current purchase location does not match with investment patterns, previous purchase locations assigned to a geofenced area, then those transactions are marked potentially fraudulent. It helps customers to quickly and directly flag that suspicious transaction that recently happened. 

Location intelligence helps banks to obtain insights from the credit card and debit card usage history. It factors the frequency of travel, purchase location, current location, to analyze the past spending behavior of customers. This helps banks to find out if any suspicious transactions have occurred in the past and saves money spent on customer complaint calls.  

Accurate mapping features from location intelligence helps insurance companies to quickly identify invalid or false addresses and develop a single customer view. It reduces the number of false positives (transactions in an insurance claim that are wrongly deemed suspicious) that mistakenly get extended to legitimate claims. It helps them improve turnaround time and speed up the claim process. 

Note: A single customer view is the holistic and unambiguous picture of the customer (insured). It provides all interface details of the customer like agents, underwriters, claim processing agents, customer service representatives, etc. It is a dynamic profile captured in a single dashboard view through major events in a customer’s life like marriage, accidents, etc.  

Determine the volume of financial business 

The entire BFSI industry, whether it is insurance, lending, or financial services depends on consumer spending capacity and the life quality index of a location. It enables them to determine the volume of financial business that can be achieved in each location. 

Location intelligence helps BFSI businesses mobilize their resources based on customer demand and improve their market share by making the right location-based decisions. 

For instance: With location intelligence, financial institutions like banks measure the risk involved in the lending journey. The location-based behavioral insights help them optimize the loan collection process, thereby preventing businesses from landing into losses. 

Insurance coverage based on risky geographic zones 

Many geographical areas are prone to more natural calamities than others. When insurance companies are looking to provide insurance services to individuals, or businesses, they should factor in the potential impacts of the calamity in that particular locality. 

Location Intelligence helps insurance firms to determine the plausible impacts of the natural calamity within a specific locality. This spatial data from forecasts and weather analytics enables them to minimize damage for policyholders and save on indemnification. Overall, it helps them determine the loss and mitigate risks.  

Easily locate nearby banks and ATMs

Banks use geolocation technology to help customers find nearby ATM branches, branch timings, products, and services offered and book an appointment with the bank manager. Also, location intelligence enables them to find the fastest route to a nearby bank facility and its directions. 

Banks use location intelligence to enhance their visibility online and increase footfall to their branch location. It improves the overall user experience for customers when they are interacting with them digitally. It maximizes sales by guiding customers to attractive services, thereby reducing customer anxiety and boosting the online customer experience. 

Location intelligence enables banks to perform data-backed analysis and make informed decisions in their daily transactions. 

For instance: Using historic location data gathered through location intelligence, banks can check mortgage value in a particular user location. It helps them view and verify the existing mortgage value of the property, thus making the risk management process simple. 

Refilling cash in ATMs 

ATM transactions are increasing with every passing day and this COVID-19 pandemic has increased cash withdrawals. Though cashless and digital transactions are dominating now, the need for cash is fulfilled completely through ATMs. 

Many refilling agencies hold the responsibility to refill cash in ATM machines regularly. ATM transactions happen in higher frequencies in densely populated areas in urban zones like malls, shops, etc. These transactions are comparatively lower in residential, suburban, and rural areas. Location intelligence is necessary to prioritize cash refilling for different areas.  

Location intelligence helps refilling agencies to identify densely populated areas and frequently refill cash in those ATM devices. It helps them quickly plan schedules for refilling cash in zones where the frequency of transactions is less. Also, it enables them to schedule time for cash refillment based on the security concerns, immediate needs, and risk factors in that area. 

Location intelligence software builds optimal routes that help ATM agencies refill cash at the right time and right place. It keeps a dynamic real-time track of the entire fleet that has left for refilling and provides on-ground happenings. Its alerts and notifications help them make crucial decisions when the vehicle is under downtimes or traffic delays. 

Location Intelligence solution enables refilling agencies to quickly assign cash refilling services to drivers based on delivery zones. It automatically generates refilling schedules based on customer demand, driver skill sets, vehicle capacity and security concerns in the delivery zones. This schedule stops multiple riders from going to ATM centers of the same vicinity.  

Location intelligence software helps refilling agencies to draw territories based on population and order volumes in each delivery zone. It helps them demarcate new territories based on refilling orders coming up in small areas. It enables logistics managers to allocate cash refilling orders to specific drivers who have good knowledge and expertise about the vicinity. 

As ATM transactions have become more volatile, undertaking daily route planning with static routes increases last-mile costs. 

Location intelligence supports dynamic territory planning so that refilling agencies need not worry much about the volatile refilling order volumes in different areas. It helps them dynamically schedule high-density refilling orders with the available drivers and minimal on-ground resources. It ensures that optimal deliveries are made in different zones without burdening logistics managers and drivers. 

Quickly verify and validate customer addresses 

BFSI companies find it quite challenging to deal with huge amounts of addresses that are entered randomly by employees or customers. They require a clean, accurate, and structured database for their daily business transactions. 

Geocoding feature in the location intelligence technology has an auto-complete feature that provides address suggestions, once the customer starts typing the form. It validates and stores addresses in a readymade format in customer-facing platforms for future reference. It has made address entry, verification, and validation much easier. 

Geocoding is a process that converts raw data into exact geographical coordinates for that address. Beyond providing accurate user location, it helps BFSI companies to assess the risks of properties based on locations and convert them into structured formats. These structured data make risk valuation procedures and reassessment of risk quicker, accurate, and effective. 

Conclusion 

With location intelligence gaining massive momentum, the BFSI industry is going through a huge transformation. It has become the driving force that enables them to find new growth opportunities and become more competitive in the marketplace. 

Locus location intelligence software helps BFSI sales professionals to fix and execute the maximum number of business appointments in a day. It helps financial companies to track the status of their visits and improve their business performance. It enables financial companies to easily visualize market gaps, risk exposure, market expansion plans and run targeted campaigns effectively.

Bringing Banking to the Customer’s Doorstep with ‘Locus for BFSI’

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