One Flew Over Your Client's Nest...

Banks, insurance, telcos and IT corporations have a lot of customers across multiple industries. They’re good at gathering, analysing and storing a lot of transactional data for clients in order to serve them better, and help sell more services to them (and find new clients).

Each of these industries are under pressure from converging technologies and evolving business models which in extreme cases disrupt whole business lines. A not-so-extreme example of this is shared mobility services which changes peoples attitudes to ownership and therefore the buying and insuring cars...not to mention maintaining them. And with the acceleration of autonomous electric vehicles (cars, trucks & buses) hitting the streets in the coming years, how we move people and goods around will shake up a bunch of industries...and open up new ones.

So what is an encumbent to do? Could ”innovation” be as simple as looking up into the sky and asking yourself ”what if I could gather useful information from a flying camera/sensor over my customer’s environment, and offer it back to them as a valuable service to help improve their own value chains?”

...and then ”what if I could do this at scale across multiple industries?”.

Throw up a drone over a construction site and you can learn a lot with the data it gathers. Utilise a fleet of thousands of drones for industrial purposes across agriculture & forestry, energy & utilities, transport & communications, maritime, cities and beyond...and whole new markets pop up. I wrote an article a while back about how banks could spin up a drone-data-as-a-service for farms to help simultaneously improve the farmers crop yield, and reduce the risk of the bank making loans to the farm.

For big IT and telco’s this is probably a no brainer. It would relatively easy for them to offer up this kind of service and lease the drones and pilots (until they go autonomous). The sheer volume of actionable data they could capture for customers would wet any CEO’s appetite. They certainly have the compute power for it, and with 5G rolling out soon the infrastructure’s not going to be a limitation. It’s probably one of the most obvious business pivots for a number of players across the financial and technology landscape, especially if they combined forces.

The question is, who is going to be the first one to offer it at scale across multiple industries?

Rhetorical...