Speaking at TowerXchange Meetup Europe, a panel of senior investors and advisors explored whether the growing array of digital solutions now available to towercos is shifting the needle on operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and long-term returns.
Charles Green, the ‘Grandfather of the Tower Industry’ and strategic advisor at Vantage Towers, Pinnacle Towers, and Edotco, said towercos have ‘never had more options to improve the efficiency of their billing, site management, site acquisition or maintenance”.
Zach Gellman, principal at investment giant DigitalBridge, emphasised the growing importance of data-driven decision making: “If you can weaponise your data, that’s really powerful.”
Gellman said DigitalBridge evaluates technology projects with the same rigour as large capital expenditures, weighing not just the quantifiable impact on internal rate of return (IRR), but also the harder-to-measure benefits that make a company “better quality, more efficient”.
He noted that investments in data collection and automation, such as automating lease management, are already driving significant efficiency gains across their portfolio.
“The core competency of every tower company is leases, and how do you manage your ground leases when you have thousands of ground leases? That historically has been a huge, manual process.
“There’s also a lot of technology out here… to automate how you manage your leases, invoicing, and renewal processes. We’re deploying a lot of different systems for data collection to keep that current. That’s where we’ve spent a lot of our time recently, especially in our European growth,” Gellman said.
Gonzague Boutry, managing director for digital infrastructure at Ardian, highlighted a shift in investor focus over the past decade to support such efforts.
“We are in a phase of more innovation, more optimisation, more value creation,” he said, advocating for a preference towards capex and technology investment over simple shareholder distributions.
Boutry argued that fostering innovation is not just about financial returns: “The satisfaction of your clients, like the MNO or the municipality, creates a lot of value that you cannot translate into a pure [financial] metric.”
Sean Keogh, VP of infrastructure investments at Brookfield, drew attention to the direct relationship between operational improvements and asset value, observing, “Every dollar of cost savings adds another $20 of value” to a tower platform.
Keogh pointed out that while headline growth opportunities like BTS and M&A can be transformative, incremental improvements, such as compressing the time to assess site capacity from a month to minutes, have an outsized impact on unit economics and customer relationships.
The panellists agreed that the success of technology investments often depends on leadership and culture.
“Any attempt to make a transformational change requires it to be directed from the top,” said Green, underlining the importance of executive buy-in for meaningful operational innovation.
Keogh added that strong relationships with management teams, combined with clear KPIs and a willingness to trial new approaches, are essential to making technology adoption stick.
