In an exclusive interview with Geospatial World, Ashwinii Rawat, Co-founder & Director, Transerve, an Indian Location Intelligence company, talks about what makes his company unique in the Indian geospatial market, its vision for the year ahead, the technologies it employs, the sectors that benefit from Location Intelligence (LI) the most, and the impact of the new geospatial guidelines on location analytics.
Transerve’s USP
We identify ourselves as an LI platform provider. We have a product called Transerve Online Stack, which is a Software-as-a-Service-based (SaaS-based) LI platform that allows users to carry out analysis on spatial data, particularly on large volume data. And it has some pre-package analysis too, meant for business decision-makers so that analysis can be readily done on the platform without resorting to in-house spatial practice.
Generally, when it comes to location data, people have a team handling the GIS software, desktop or web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the databases. We have made that process easy by providing the tools for those business analysts, so that they can take a much more informed decision. The key differentiator, between Transerve and other geospatial analytics companies, is that we are good at handling a large volume of data, particularly on Cloud; data that comes at a very high speed, and on a regular basis. One of the examples of such a dataset is, the human mobility data.
Vision for 2022
Things are going at a far quicker pace now, especially after the introduction of the new geospatial policy in February 2021. The policy has allowed companies like us to host a lot of data on web and disseminate it to our clients. The vision for Transerve is to go global this year, because we have access to datasets. We have had more and more clients in developed economies. So, the vision of Transerve is to have a larger footprint globally.
Technologies at play
We are focusing more on the better data processing. We do have plans for providing the raster-based analysis to our customer, particularly on higher resolution imagery. So, we are still waiting for remote sensing policy to get relaxed, to allow companies like us to host the data on web. And the main idea was to allow our customers to detect the changes over a period of time. This entire technology has been built from scratch by using things like Python and other Modern Stack, like MEAN Stack, which uses the geospatial capabilities of Big Data onto our platform. From a technical aspect, things have become flexible for our users to handle the large volume of data. As such, we are not using any third party application.
Sectoral application
Over the period of last one, one and a half years, especially after COVID-19, we have seen the adoption of location and geospatial technology at a much faster rate. And to name some of the sectors, I would like to keep Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) at present, followed by sectors like retail and real estate. These three sectors have seen adoption that does not require prior experience working with the geospatial datasets. And if I talk about the BFSI sector in particular, we have seen the new age technology companies like ADM Capital, and other FinTech companies eyeing more and more users on their platform. Not just in terms of allowing for easy payments, but also for low disbursements as well.
There are companies who want to do micro-zonal analysis to figure out where product requirement is coming from, where exactly do the good customers live.
Because of COVID-19, a lot of points of interest (POIs) have changed in India. In some of the cities we have seen that at least 13-15% of businesses have either shifted to a new location, or they have moved from a larger province to a smaller province, or some of them have shut down, or new business have come up. Private sector banks want to know what new businesses have come up in the last two years, where they can reach out and then provide financial services to those business owners. So, BFSI, retail, and real estate would be the largest adopters of location and geospatial technology among all sectors.
Impact of geospatial reforms on location analytics
The reforms will allow spatial location intelligence companies to host data. Earlier there were restrictions on collecting the high resolution data, as well as hosting it and selling it to the clients who were not Indian. But that has been done away with up to certain accuracy. Data can be hosted on Cloud, and can be accessed by not just Indian companies, but by foreign companies as well. Geospatial policy has made things easy for the companies eyeing to provide location intelligence services on our web platform. Despite the widespread adoption of Cloud in last decade, the geospatial industry in India was actually one of the last adopters because of the restrictions on sharing or restoring the data on Cloud.
Partners and future growth
We have identified almost 2,000 trusted data sources globally who provide data in different domains, be it consumer spending data, consumer behavior data, or human geographic data — all data on parameters like demographic, or socioeconomic parameters at high resolutions. There are companies who we have already signed up, not just in India, but in Europe, the UK, and Canada and the US, who are going to host their datasets on our platform.
Another interesting thing that we are going to provide pretty soon on our platform is merging first-party data — data that is owned by the customer — with our data. If I talk about a bank, with its own geospatial data, it can take the data Transerve provides on the platform and merge it with its own datasets to create customer personas.
Future sectors where I see growth happening is the e-commerce industry, particularly for last meter connectivity. The challenge, not just in India but globally, is that the precision, or accuracy, of the Point of Interest (POI) is not that great as of now. Everyone talks about the last mile connectivity, but only very few people are able to attempt this challenge of taking the delivery boys, or the logistics company to the doorstep of their consumer.
