Nevada State Bank says it expects to make better decisions about where to build branches in the booming Las Vegas market by combining in-house data with publicly available information using a visual mapping tool.
The bank, a unit of Zions Bancorp in Salt Lake City, is one of the first to use the tool, called AnySite Financial, which was announced last month by MapInfo Corp. of Troy, N.Y.
"We're all looking for the golden nugget of information," Jeff Bargerhuff, the bank's senior vice president of marketing, said in an interview. "There's not like a mother lode out there."
Nevada State is using the online tool to more precisely match the demographic and financial profiles of retirees and small businesses, which lets it use public databases in conjunction with proprietary information the bank has developed on its customer base.
"You try to find prospects who look like your clients," Mr. Bargerhuff said. A limitation of conventional approaches is that many analysis methods evaluate data from within a certain distance of a given location but may disregard physical features such as freeways or watercourses. Thus, he said, though a site may appear attractive for a customer market in a three-mile radius, "with the natural and man-made barriers, it's not necessarily true."
Nevada State began using the MapInfo tool a couple of months ago, he said, and though executives have not yet employed it from the start of a branch site-selection project, "it has added value." "We had some sites already selected. We went back in and verified our gut feeling," he said
