Thursday, July 29, 2010

Welcome To the ESRI Financial Services Special Interest Group

It's 9AM.  Do you know where your market penetration is?  How about your signage?

After over 20 years of business GIS practice, it still surprises us how many of our retail financial services clients still don't act like retailers.  We have audit trails and hey, vaults - not to mention the need for privacy when discussing one's finances - so it's never going to be an open space floorplan like the doomed WAMU Occassio concept.  But we do need to embrace useful retail concepts.  Like, market penetration, so you know how well penetrated you are in branch trade areas, and where to align resources to Target and Dominate by potential and penetration.  And, carrying primary site characteristics for each one of your offices in the GIS, so you can understand what drives branch performance not only from a location perspective, but from a site perspective.

There is a very useful, very easy to use Wizard that ESRI's product team has put into Business Analyst (Trade Area Analysis, Customer Data Required, Market Penetration), that very easily allows you to conduct market penetration analysis, doing what ESRI does best - comparing your data to the external community, transparently, and allowing you to identify and act upon your stengths and weaknesses.


For you power users out there, check out the Market Penetration section in online help,  http://tinyurl.com/2bxyhlu.

Next - what is a site, and what is a location, and how we store and apply each in the GIS.