When you need to take cash out of an ATM, you want an ATM to be nearby. Your bank, too, wants you to be able to quickly step to one of its ATMs so that you can carry out your transaction -- and walk away a satisfied customer. But in choosing the locations for installing ATMs in the most convenient places for customers, banks cannot simply rely on guesswork. For banks to make the right decisions, they need the right data.
This location data theme was the focus of Quadrant’s latest event hosted at our Singapore headquarters: “Better Data, Better Decisions, Better Outcomes -- Make the right Decisions with the Right Data.” And judging by the packed, standing-room only audience and insightful back-and-forth at question time, not to mention the highly-engaged post-presentation networking, we are proud to call the February 21 event success. We are grateful to the dozens of people, from data scientists to data buyers and data sellers, who turned out and helped make it an evening to remember.
Roger Ganga, who leads Quadrant’s Data Science team, told the audience how he himself ends up walking further to get to the closest ATM from the office only to turn around and stride back to buy lunch at the nearby food stands where cash is king. This is exactly the kind of problem -- where businesses need to better understand where to locate their services -- that drives financial services companies to look at location data insights.
Quadrant’s Senior Data Consultant Glenn Harrison explained how we researched and provided a case study regarding Union Bank and where to best place new ATMs in downtown Los Angeles, a major hub for the U.S. bank. By segmenting data, we were able to create samples based on people in downtown LA who are not tourists and were spending more than 30 seconds near ATM locations. We then generated a heat map, which spawned recommendations for the case study whereby the bank locate ATMs 200-300 meters from these areas.
At Quadrant, whether we are talking the US or AIPAC, our goal is to provide the best data. As Roger pointed out, the standard for what represents “quality data” in the industry depends on the exact decision businesses need to make. That is why Quadrant dedicates itself to providing the right location data to help businesses make the right decisions for their growth. “Each data has a specific use case to solve,” Roger said.
Glenn cited a Forbes report that two thirds of enterprises now rank mobile location data as critical or highly important to their revenue growth strategies. It is no wonder then that the location intelligence market size is expected to grow to $32 billion by 2025. As Glenn likes to say: “The power of ‘where’ is the next industrial revolution.”
Another saying is that: in the desert, water is life. For many enterprise businesses, the saying should be that data is life. Whether it is for retail shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur or financial services in Los Angeles, data is essential to helping organizations identify the habits, needs, and wants of their customers and potential customers.
Where Are Your Customers?
Glenn and Roger also exhibited a use case to help, by way of example, Bank of America, reach customers traveling across the United States and save scarce marketing budget. This time the scenario was of the financial institution wanting to target new customers among American business travellers -- and our ability to respond. Roger explained how we identified a sample process to include U.S. travellers passing through Los Angeles’ main airport more than once within fewer than 12 days. The data science team unearthed findings that these likely business travellers most frequently came from airports at San Francisco, Las Vegas and Dallas. From those results, the recommendation would be clear for the bank to focus marketing to target these three locations and to establish a point-of-sales promotional operation to capture these potential customers.
Providing the right location data “helps to improve the relevance of their marketing communications, it helps to increase the engagement with the audience they are trying to address and, ultimately, it helps to eliminate waste in their marketing spend,” Glenn said.
These and other compelling use cases presented at our event underscored why we are placing so much emphasis at Quadrant on location data as we grow our company quickly. In conclusion, Glenn put it best: “You can see how effective location data is and that, ultimately, location matters,”
If you weren’t able to make it, don’t worry — we have the presentation material available for download here.
We will be holding more events in the future. We hope to see you at upcoming events.
