Location Intelligence For Financial Services

Let us speak about opportunities that Location Intelligence could bring to the financial sector.

‘Location intelligence’= Insights on people and places, often time series based.

This is an often-overlooked tool that can greatly help businesses make the most out of their existing activities. This is particularly true for the financial sector, where established players have been conducting their operations in a very conservative manner for generations. Location data has great potential to deleverage risk of investment decisions, by providing insights that were never utilized in the industry before.

What are the most significant use cases for private equity, rating agencies and equity & fixed income research firms?

Private Equity

Firms that work in this particular sector are mainly involved in investments of capital in companies that are not listed on a public exchange, or in buyouts of public companies to turn them back into private.

One of the crucial aspects of private equity operations is to perform accurate due diligence. Before investing in a company, the firm needs to assess the decision from a multitude of different angles. This is necessary to prevent the wrong use of capital and potential losses for the company. Another recurring task is tracking current investments. It is important to monitor the ongoing performance of current assets in order to assess possible changes in the portfolio.

Early birds of the industry are already taking advantage of the first tools that offer location data.

· They are able to access information about their competitors by observing real time performance of brands on their portfolios.

· They can also analyse different brands in terms of demographics as well as the total footfall of individual locations or clusters.

· Finally, it is really easy to benchmark across a variety of sectors, really understanding if the chosen asset is performing at the level of other players in the same industry.

Credit Rating Agencies

The main business of credit rating agencies is to assess companies, non-profit organizations and even government entities. Gathering all the information needed, they then determine their likelihood to repay the debt that they are willing to issue.

In this particular sector, it is very difficult to get live information from non-listed companies to know if there is a possibility of them going bankrupt.

· For this reason, it is crucial for rating agencies to find alternative sources of tangible data that could give more information about a given company.

· Location data can provide valuable insights about the footfall of both single units, as well as aggregated locations.

· Embracing location intelligence tools could make a difference in the decision-making process, as they would be able to assess companies from a new perspective that was never available before.

Equity & Fixed Income Research

This broad sector is populated with firms that mostly trade public companies. It comprises firms that invest both in the stock exchange, as well as in debt securities. One of the priorities for such organizations is to have access to a wide variety of real-time information. It is also very important to know how competitors are performing.

· Location data is able to offer a direct sneak peek into competitors’ portfolios by giving insights on the performance of the brands they have invested in.

· At the same time, real time data about their current assets could be accessed instantly, without having to wait for quarterly reports on stale data.

Location intelligence offers countless yet not many companies have utilized location data to mitigate their challenges. As Big Data evolves and produces new categories of tangible knowledge, firms are expected to embrace non-traditional solutions more and more in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

In this knowledge-based economy — Knowledge will be the tool that will tip the balance in your favor.

For a better understanding of what location data can do for your business, join our Breakfast event on the 28th of February at Techspace London. Register on the below Link

Link: http://bit.ly/2S6VEv5