Location analytics and business intelligence has reached to almost all sectors. Current scenario is that over 97% of the large companies leverage analytics, with more than 100 million users worldwide. It has also been observed in a study by IDC that data-driven businesses analysing and understanding their data are 6% more profitable and 5% more productive.

Location basically unifies theme for the business as location can be a service boundary, an address, a delivery route or a sales territory. Along with the disruptive technologies such as cloud, artificial intelligence, machine learning etc., location analytics helps in rapid innovation cycle for the players in the financial domain. Now the time has arrived when we need to accept the technological change and move towards the analytical maturity curve through a 360-degree approach.

These disruptive technologies have made its impact in every sector which has led to the emergence of new applications. The main focus is from a whole range of consumer-based applications to apps which provide complete end-to-end solutions. For example, India required digital mapping twenty years back but the time has changed drastically now that there are digital map twins. This includes a 360-degree panoramic view from both inside as well as outside. Location-based analytics can trace each and every address of the country and analyze it accordingly to different categories like tracking their income pattern etc.

With the vast amount of data and their analytics, real change can be observed between innovation and growth of new applications based on location. The trend has gone from static to dynamic content and now it has been changed to connecting content.

Few of the cases which show that location analytics has helped in increasing profit are:

Tokyo-based-company Tamecco offers a product that is currently deployed at 2500 brick-and-mortar-stores across Japan. They mainly focus on customer satisfaction and in achieving that moto location-based analytics helps a lot. Their website states, "know when your customers come in and where they go, maximizing customer satisfaction with loyalty rewards and store layout improvements." Multiple tech start-ups are offering artificial intelligence-powered solution for retailers with the objective to get the most out of customer data.

Teemo with the tagline of "Drive-to-Store" marketing platform is revolutionizing retail advertising. This platform has the feature of analyzing the consumer data, such as previously visited locations and determine which advertisement has led to the action.  Its website explains, "We target your prospects based on the places they attend in real life." Teemo used to acquire these data through direct mobile app partnerships and to date, it has collected over 1,170 billion geolocation data points. Retailers identify the most valuable consumers by using the customer's location history. This helps in providing more personalized campaign and increase conversions.

Grey Jean Technologies also uses location-based marketing analytics. This technique helps in finding target customers and prospects with the more relevant marketing by potentially increasing the store visits, foot traffic etc. Their website explains, "Grey Jean's AI-powered recommendation engine, Genie, provides the most accurate predictions of consumer purchase behavior based transaction history, demographics, location, time, social media activity, preferences, and behavior.

Conclusion

This era is moving toward artificial intelligence and business intelligence which helps in providing a treasure of information. It is expected that industries will benefit from emerging technologies like geospatial intelligence, visual analytics, and forecasting. In the building of these technologies, smartphones have played an important role. It has become the part and parcel of our life in each and every sphere. The future will see an enormous explosion of data from sensors, smart devices, as a result location analytics is going to be more pervasive.