In banking, knowing where your competitors are — and what they are doing — is essential. Are they opening new branches in high-growth areas? Closing underperforming ATMs? Deploying agents in your territory? This intelligence informs your own branch expansion, marketing spend, and strategic defence.
Yet most banks rely on manual, ad-hoc methods: staff driving around to note competitor signs, subscribing to expensive third-party reports, or piecing together information from public sources. These methods are slow, incomplete, and often outdated.
Consider a bank planning to open a new branch in an expanding residential area. Before committing millions, they need to answer: how many competitor branches are within a 3 km radius? Have any competitors recently opened or closed in this area? What services do they offer? What are their catchment areas overlapping with ours? Without a systematic way to collect and visualise this data, banks rely on guesswork — and may overbuild in saturated markets or miss opportunities in underserved zones.
Competitor intelligence can be gathered from publicly available sources — regulatory filings of licensed branches, competitor websites and branch locators, and field visits by bank staff. Once collected, these POIs are added to a separate layer in Locator Map Plus, visible only to authorised strategic planning staff. The platform then provides:
A regional bank used Locator Map Plus to track three national competitors. The analysis revealed that a competitor was quietly opening five new branches in a corridor the bank had identified as high-growth, another had closed three ATMs in a low-income area creating an unserved zone, and a third had no presence in a rapidly industrialising zone where the bank already had land. The bank accelerated its own opening in the high-growth corridor, deployed two low-cost ATMs in the unserved zone, and negotiated a prime location in the industrial zone before competitors arrived. The result: first-mover advantage in two key markets, and defended share in a third.
All competitive intelligence data stays on your infrastructure — no competitor data is ever shared with third-party map providers. This is not espionage. It is smart, systematic business intelligence. By mapping your rivals' physical networks, you gain clarity on where to attack, where to defend, and where to expand — using data that is entirely publicly available, systematically organised for the first time.
Connect with our team for a personalised demonstration of how Locator Map Plus addresses these specific operational challenges.
Book a Demo →Join 300+ financial institutions across Africa using Locator Map Plus to power branch discovery, ATM intelligence, and agent network visibility — in a single enterprise integration.