OpenSpace Partners With Nedbank Property Finance
OpenSpace Partners With Nedbank Property Finance. OpenSpace, the global leader in reality capture, announced a partnership with Nedbank, the largest commercial property financier in South Africa. Through this partnership, OpenSpace provides Nedbank’s clients with the ability to track site progress and improves communication across key stakeholders on the project. Additionally, Nedbank is also able to use this information to reduce its risk profile, leading to time and money savings. As Nedbank scales the use of OpenSpace across its portfolio, they currently have 25 active sites across Africa.
“OpenSpace is an incredible tool that allows us to monitor construction risks proactively,” says Genevieve Naidoo, Divisional Executive: Property Finance PM, Valuations & Sustainability Nedbank CIB. “Initially, we were concerned about the additional cost of the platform, since property development projects are sensitive to extra costs. But the benefits of OpenSpace far outweigh the cost of the technology in terms of saving time for teams. Being able to pay our clients quicker creates a huge benefit for them as well and allows them to manage their cash flow cycles.”
Nedbank began offering OpenSpace’s platform as a solution during the COVID-19 pandemic to clients in Kenya, Morocco, and Mauritius. When other banks could not or would not undertake development finance for their clients due to travel restrictions and lockdown regulations, making it difficult to monitor risk, Nedbank partnered with OpenSpace to offer an innovative solution to its clients. OpenSpace enabled the Nedbank team and its clients to continue its inspections and allowed banks to pay clients on time and proactively engage with the clients on costly change orders and potential delays. Nedbank’s clients are able to monitor jobsite conditions from any location and communicate using OpenSpace’s core functionalities, including the Field Notes feature.
With OpenSpace Capture, users simply attach an off-the-shelf, consumer 360° camera to their hard hat and walk the site as they normally would. Once the video from the walk is uploaded to the cloud, OpenSpace’s computer vision technology stitches images together and pins all the 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 to view about 15 minutes after upload.
“As industry professionals look for digital solutions to maximize their time and increase collaboration across countries, we believe it’s important to make their lives simpler and easier,” said OpenSpace CEO and co-founder Jeevan Kalanithi. “We are proud to be partnering with Nedbank as they look to scale their clients’ use of OpenSpace, and we are excited for the opportunity to bring time and money savings across their portfolio.”
