OpenSpace, the world’s leading reality capture provider, today announced a partnership with Nedbank, the largest commercial real estate lender in South Africa. Through this partnership, OpenSpace offers Nedbank’s customers the ability to track site progress and improve communication between key project stakeholders. In addition, Nedbank is able to use this information to reduce its risk profile, resulting in time and money savings. As Nedbank scales its use of OpenSpace across its portfolio, they currently have 25 active locations across Africa.
“OpenSpace is an incredible tool that allows us to proactively monitor construction risk,” said Genevieve Naidoo, Divisional Executive: Property Finance PM, Valuations & Sustainability Nedbank CIB. “Initially we were concerned about the additional costs of the platform as real estate development projects are sensitive to additional costs. But the benefits of OpenSpace far outweigh the technology’s cost in terms of time savings for teams. Being able to pay our customers faster creates a huge advantage for them too and allows them to manage their cash flow cycles.”
Nedbank began offering OpenSpace’s platform as a solution to customers in Kenya, Morocco, and Mauritius during the COVID-19 pandemic. When other banks were unable or unwilling to provide development finance for their customers due to travel restrictions and lockdown regulations, which made risk monitoring difficult, Nedbank partnered with OpenSpace to offer their customers an innovative solution. OpenSpace enabled the Nedbank team and their customers to continue their inspections, allowing banks to pay customers on time and proactively engage with customers about costly change orders and potential delays. Nedbank’s customers are able to monitor site conditions from any location and communicate via OpenSpace’s core functionality, including the Field Notes feature.
With OpenSpace Capture, users simply attach an off-the-shelf 360° consumer camera to their hard hat and walk through the job site as usual. Once the tour video is uploaded to the cloud, OpenSpace’s computer vision technology stitches the images together and pins all images to the floor plan, creating a trusted visual record of site status. Powered by the company’s vision engine, the site image map is typically ready for viewing around 15 minutes after upload.
“As industry professionals look for digital solutions to maximize their time and improve collaboration between countries, we believe it’s important to make their lives easier and simpler,” said Jeevan Kalanithi, CEO and co-founder of OpenSpace. “We’re proud to partner with Nedbank as they strive to scale their customers’ use of OpenSpace, and we’re excited about the opportunity to save time and money across their portfolio.”
