New York, NY – Proximity.Directory, the world’s largest directory of proximity companies, has released its Q3 2017 Report. The report, which has aggregated information from more than 457 Proximity Solution Providers in over 58 different countries, reveals the latest trends, facts and figures from the global proximity industry and its adoption by the financial industry. The report explores why commercial banks and investment companies turn to location data and proximity technology. This is the 9th edition of the Proximity.Directory Report.
“Retail banks and hedge funds are the pioneers of the financial industry and have started mining location and proximity data,” said Thomas Walle, CEO and co-founder of Unacast, the creators of Proximity.Directory. “We all remember how Foursquare predicted Chipotle’s financial performance in 2016 by analyzing foot traffic. This was just the beginning. As the world is getting more and more sensored up, investment companies turn to the new sources of alternative data to get the most out of the market. In this report, we explain how they benefit from it and also touch on what the future holds.”
The Q3 Proximity.Directory Report found that hedge funds are increasingly relying on location and proximity data to predict market performance and shift trends. Satellite, foot traffic and IoT data provide key insights with sophistication, at scale, and in real time. This data has allowed investors to increase scalability of the market predictions, stop fortune-telling on the stock market, and create new economic indicators. Elsewhere in the financial sector, location data helps commercial banks improve efficiencies, identify underserved markets, and maximize profitability. Proximity technology provides insights into optimizing branches and ATMs, as well as facilitates engagement and enhances customer touch points, which develops loyalty and leads to increasing market share.
Case Study Summaries:
Citibank ran a pilot program with Gimbal to help find a way to provide a more hyper-targeted mobile experience relevant to their customer’s time and place, the ability to offer a new and secure way to open ATM doors, and the future capability of creating alerts for branches when VIP customers enter their banking centers. Along with beacon technology, Citi utilized Gimbal’s geofencing technology for Citi sponsored events such as the Today Show/Citi Summer Concert Series. Through Gimbal’s Manager software, Citi could pinpoint and draw custom polygonal geofences in order to message Citi app users who were near Rockefeller Plaza and other Manhattan areas that were part of the Citi Concert Series. When users crossed these geofences, they would receive a relevant message from Citi around the event.
In Turkey, Poi Labs worked with Türkiye İş Bankası to reduce cash withdrawal process time with a unique and better experience. Through the use of a specially created USB BLE beacon, time required to withdraw cash was reduced by 65%.
Net Clearance worked with Danske Bank to enable BLE mobile payments at Point of Sale from iOS and Android devices using the same payment terminal. Netclearance supplied Danske Bank with the MobilePay terminal. As of today, more than 3.4 million Danes use the MobilePay app making it the number one application in Denmark, outpacing Facebook and Whatsapp. The MobilePay BLE terminal enables consumers to pay using the MobilePay mobile wallet app at the checkout at many of the nation’s retail outlets.
Pitney Bowes Business Insight worked with Bank of America to identify locations of the banking centers in low income neighborhoods in order to receive an outstanding ranking on CRA compliance while maintaining bottom-line profitability. The geographic analysis application helped the bank gain important insights into target markets and strengthen its commitment to CRA compliance, while impacting site selection decision-making in those areas. This resulted in 25% time cuts compared to manual audit of a network of banking centers, easy mapping, visualization, and analysis of geospatial measurements, and maximization of the CRA compliance score.
Accenture worked with Garanti Bank in Turkey to personalize the relationship with clients and their finances by giving them more control over their money. Accenture created iGaranti, an “atomized” service that has 23 different applications that leverage big data analytics and can be personalized for each user—resulting in 100,000 downloads of iGaranti in the first month after its launch and has more than 70,000 active users.
Proximity Industry Growth & Highlights:
17.3 million sensors are registered on Proximity.Directory—a 14% increase since last quarter. 58% of these sensors are beacons, 25% are Wi-Fi points, and 17% are NFC sensors. Compared to the previous quarter, the number of Wi-Fi sensors deployed increased by 47% and the number of NFC sensors by 33%, while the number of beacons remained stable.
The UK is 14 times more sensored than the US and 41 times more sensored than Canada.
77% the PSPs contributing to Proximity.Directory are from North America and Europe.
The rest of the world accounts for just over 20% of the total number of registered providers.
More and more companies from emerging markets recognize the opportunities of location and proximity solutions. Since the Q2 2017, the number of companies from Africa increased by 80%, from South America by 56% and from Asia by 24%.
Among different proximity technologies, beacons are still the most popular with 91% of the companies delivering these solutions. GPS/Geofencing and Wi-Fi continue to grow and are offered by 58% and 35% of the companies respectively.
Proximity Solution Providers do not want to exclusively choose between iBeacon and Eddystone as most of the companies work with both protocols depending on the use cases. Eddystone is currently supported by the 55% of the industry while iBeacon by 83%.
About Proximity.Directory
Proximity.Directory is the world’s largest directory of proximity companies. Recently rebranded from Proxbook to open up the platform to a wider audience and companies, Proximity. Directory has shifted from a technology-specific focus toward the deterministic location story. There are other analytics/hardware/software companies out there that are not focused on NFC, Wi-Fi or Beacons, but still able to solve location through deterministic context. As of today we encourage all of these companies to sign up to the directory for free and start showcasing their products.
About Unacast
Unacast, the world’s leading location and proximity data platform, built the Real World Graph™ to understand how people and places are connected. Unacast empowers the next generation of data-driven industries with unique and highly accurate data sets and insights, built on a foundation of double-deterministic™ proximity data.
Unacast is based in NYC, founded by Thomas Walle and Kjartan Slette, who were also part of the founding team behind TIDAL, the music streaming company acquired by Jay Z. Unacast has garnered multiple awards for its platform, campaigns and for its rapid company growth, most recently winning the Ads-to-Action Award in the “verticals & marketplaces” category at the Local Search Association (LSA) awards in San Diego. Inc. Magazine has called Unacast “The Startup That Just Might Threaten Google.”
