Course overview
Banking and finance decisions often depend on location: where borrowers live and trade, where branches compete, which properties secure loans, and where climate or infrastructure events may affect portfolios. Yet customer, transaction, collateral and risk data are frequently analysed in spreadsheets without geographic context. GIS turns these records into decision-ready maps and spatial models that reveal concentration risk, service gaps, fraud patterns, market potential and exposure to physical hazards.
This course develops practical GIS capability for retail banking, commercial banking, insurance, microfinance and financial-services operations. Participants prepare banking datasets for mapping; join customer, branch, ATM, loan and property records to geographic boundaries; analyse catchments, accessibility and market coverage; and use geocoding, spatial queries, buffers, drive-time areas, hotspot analysis and suitability models. The course also examines remote-sensing data for flood exposure, land-use change, agricultural finance and collateral assessment. Data governance, privacy, coordinate systems, metadata and map communication are addressed throughout.
Teaching combines concise technical briefings with guided software work, financial-services cases, group analysis and structured review of maps and models. Participants progressively develop a location-intelligence project using a realistic banking or finance dataset, then refine it through peer and instructor feedback. They leave with reusable analysis templates, map specifications and a documented GIS workflow that can be adapted to branch planning, credit risk, financial inclusion, insurance underwriting or portfolio monitoring.
The course is suited to professionals who already work with banking, customer, property, operational or risk data and need to add spatial analysis to their decisions.

