Role Of Location Intelligence In Personalising Banking Services

Augmenting the overall banking experience for users is something that banks are on the lookout for constantly. One can’t deny the fact that optimum consumer satisfaction is the key to retaining your consumer base and also staying ahead of the competition.

To this end, location intelligence has emerged as a great aid for banks in understanding how their banking operations can be better optimised - in assisting their customers in locating the closest Branch/ATM, or even for rolling out products in certain regions.

Ever since the digitisation of banking services, banks have been investing in various technologies that can improve user experience, deliver last-mile services, enable secure transactions, create new financial products and also the simplification of any compliance requirements. In a general sense, banks have been preoccupied with bringing protocols and products that can enable an efficient carrying out of processes in the financial services sector.

Adding the component of location to this mix ends up enhancing the services to a great extent. You could start with something as simple as address verification to more complex analysis such as spending patterns on the basis of frequent purchases made by a customer. All this data ends up creating invaluable actionable customer insights, which can be utilised for the fulfilment of their existing or imminent requirements.

Location intelligence can aid banks in mitigating risk when it comes to digital lending. With millions of point of interest across hundreds of categories in varied API stacks and available graphics, bands can now visualise for example how a small store in tier 3 city appears in real-time and what are the optimal ways of reaching there. The available data generally represents all geographical boundaries, stripped to the taluka level.

Generally the baseline of data that is available support query platforms and operates in conjunction with an IoT platform. These two together are only used for creating standard point solutions that are available to solve the needs of a BFSI client and can be connected to the CRM on any digital platform.

To gain a simple understanding of how location intelligence can help out BFSI companies, one can take the example of let's say a student from a small town who has moved to a metropolis for work, in this instance let us say Delhi, while his office might be in Gurgaon he resides in Delhi and generally uses an ATM which is closer to home. As his goals increase, he might require a loan or overdraft facility, and all this can be gauged from the destinations on his map.

If you are wondering about how all this information is obtained, it is generally done through software development kits that are available in a user’s smartphone and all this data gathered is generally used for developing insights that can give us a look into what are the customers’ needs. These actionable insights generally can be used to give a customer a personalised experience wherever he goes - to the point of directing him to the nearest retail store.

A survey by Accenture showed that more than half the respondents wanted their banks to recommend banking products and services to them proactively, and that offer would help in increasing their loyalty to the particular bank. Location-based marketing campaigns hence, have a higher success rate and also on the basis of the information gathered from prevalent areas, spending patterns, etc. risk profiling can also be conducted.

Not only this, another important aspect that location intelligence can help with when it comes to personalised banking services is flagging of fraudulent transactions. For example, if a debit card is being swiped at a particular location, however, the customer's phone is shown to be a considerable distance away, then such transactions can be flagged proactively, and the customer can be notified of such a transaction to authorise or alert it for verification.

Thus, with a thorough analysis of data gained through location intelligence and viewing it in conjunction with business data available, banks can make much more informed decisions, all the while being cognizant of the kind of customer-centric products and strategies that are needed. Apart from enhancing the quality of customer engagement, it will also help them in understanding the existence of any kind of inefficiencies in the networks for example ATMs that are not seeing any traffic can be shut down. Simply put, location intelligence can not only aid banking operations for banks but also their customers with a single click.