Now more than ever, KYC is developing into a dynamic and effective process. By incorporating geospatial data, financial institutions enhance the accuracy of customer verifications, elevate their risk assessment capabilities, and ensure robust compliance with ever-changing global regulations. Location services enable banks to provide financial services responsibly and securely, ensuring that they retain the correct customer information through street address verification.

With location APIs, banks have accurate address data at the first point of capture validated, fixed and geocoded addresses, each with a unique identifier giving them a single and accurate view of clients.

Geospatial data (including weather data) offered by AfriGIS helps banks identify geographic-specific risks, such as natural disasters, economic downturns, flood risk or high lightning and hail/ storm occurrences in certain areas. This information is crucial for managing credit risks and making informed lending and insurance decisions.

By analysing location data, various banks can determine the best locations for new branches and ATMs, ensuring they are placed where they are most needed and can serve the highest number of customers. They can further target specific demographic profiles (e.g. FSTC). This leads to improved branch profiling, enhanced reporting and division activity per location. This further allows for more personalised marketing and service offerings.

If transactions occur in locations that deviate significantly from general patterns, it can trigger alerts for potential fraud. By analysing geospatial data, banks can identify broader fraud patterns and trends, helping them to develop more effective prevention strategies.

By studying market demand, population growth and tracking competitors’ locations, financial institutions can gain a competitive edge and identify opportunities for expansion or improvement. Combining this with area growth data available from AfriGIS enables them to outperform their competitors, drive more business, push down costs, and understand customers’ needs better so they can become exponentially more resilient and profitable.

AfriGIS offers a full (current and historic) transfer and bonds dataset as registered with the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR). AfriGIS links all property transfers and bonds (active and inactive) to the most comprehensive cadastre and national address dictionary (NAD) datasets across South Africa and enable financial institutions to access via geographic data updated monthly or access via a dedicated API supporting multiple endpoints.