The Untapped Value of Imagery Data in Financial Services
David Harberson is a financial consultant with decades of expertise in the financial industry helping giants like JP Morgan, Franklin Templeton, Bank of the West, and other institutions leverage data and information to drive powerful business solutions. He sat down with our team to do a Q&A on why now is the time for the financial services industry to go all in on the untapped opportunity of aerial imagery.
What are some of the challenges your industry has faced in using data previously?
There’s historically been significant limitations on the data we’ve had available to us but that has been changing rapidly with Big Data, easier access to unstructured data and finding new sources that we had never considered before. Now that we have the technical capabilities to make better use of data, it’s time to reimagine what we can do with the data available to us, like aerial imagery.
Why do you feel like aerial imagery hasn’t really been explored and tapped into up to this point?
Aerial imagery has been in use for awhile in the Insurance sector, but the broader banking space hasn’t really investigated this to see what value can be unlocked and what the true potential is for adding it to portfolios. This comes down to understanding the number of interesting use cases aerial imagery provides to the financial industry.
What’s one of these use cases you find valuable?
Disaster imagery, what Vexcel calls their Gray Sky imagery, which monitors weather and major disasters. This would be a clear use case for Enterprise risk in understanding a bank’s exposure to a severe weather event or a major disaster both proactively and after the event. What an opportunity not only in managing risk but also a customer service dimension–ever had your bank send out a communication to warn you about an upcoming weather event with some practical advice?
Are there other use cases or property details that would be beneficial?
Vexcel’s Elements product has very granular property details. Clearly a bonus in the insurance space, but what about the opportunity for the home or commercial lending space? Do you really get quality appraisals information? California is a rapidly changing market where the risk of wildfires is requiring property owners to have much more aggressive defensible space management and property information like what Vexcel provides would be critical. Also, 3D Cities can be a valuable overlay to GIS-based solutions and allow a much deeper understanding of the city landscapes and a much more granular, detailed view than what is currently provided by satellite imagery.
Is using aerial imagery about growing the opportunity to see more to reduce risk?
The use cases that present themselves are in the areas of Enterprise risk and retail and commercial lending. This level of visualization combined with other data can produce advanced analytics that would not have been possible. This could be analytics to feed a physical location strategy such as branches or ATM locations.
Any final advantages you want to point out?
One last thing that is a big advantage is that you can also look at a time series of imagery to gauge changes to a property. Construction monitoring is an easy application, as is damage assessment after a disaster such as a hurricane. We now have the ability to incorporate both multispectral imagery and elevation data for natural features and built features to show land quality, vegetation growth, erosion to properties, flood risk, and drought impact. Really, the opportunity to leverage these relatively new sources of data has never been better and there is real potential to create differentiation in the Financial Services space.
