Dan2021. What an interesting year. With the world turned upside down by a pandemic that seemingly had its sights set on...
Prognosis: As 2020 kicks off so does IR participation in industry events!
IR
Dan
Silicon Valley may be where it all happens for tech but its New York where retailing continues to hold sway. There was a time when young actors flocked to Hollywood and engineers headed to Detroit, but when it comes to marketing it has always been about Madison Avenue and for Madison Avenue companies retailers represented a large portion of their revenues. Soap operas on TV? All began as a way for vendors to tap new technology to reach a bigger audience.
When it comes to major events for retailers there is none bigger than that held this January in New York by the National Retail Federation. Billed as NRF 2020 Vision, it attracted more than 40,000 attendees that, as NRF noted, it was the venue where this large community could “share visionary ideas, build visionary partnerships and experience visionary technology.” There is no shortage of vendors promoting their vision for technology, products or markets – the HPE NonStop community is not one to shy away from such a trend having seen HPE lay its plans for NonStop – and for retailers change is happening at a rapid clip.
Will Amazon succeed with rolling out stores with no check-out lanes? Will WalMart and Target prove competitive (to Amazon) long term? Will the community at large embrace grocery deliveries being made within two hours? Will wearables become commonly used “jewelry” and will there be even wider adoption of facial recognition technology? If you missed the promotions by NRF following the last day of the event, you might have missed just how inclusive the event proved to be with presentations from the likes of Nordstrom, to Peleton and Nike and where the closing keynote was from Goop Founder and CEO, Gwyneth Paltrow! Given the presence of such star power it was the ideal venue for IR to promote its Prognosis solutions for retailers and where Prognosis on NonStop represented the best fit for retailers today as they keep their doors open 24 x 7 across a world that increasingly is turning to eCommerce to remain competitive.
“Payment innovation in the merchant internet and digital arena are still outpacing the traditional card rails found in brick and mortar shops. Yet, cards remain alive and well as the US let’s other countries experiment with account-to-account faster payment programs and EMV’s mobile payments. If new payment methods are to succeed, merchants and consumers will be the clear winners.” – Jim Bowers, Payments & Infrastructure Solution Engineer at IR
IR has been a longtime supporter of NonStop events dating back to the early 1990s – who can remember those first tentative steps taken at the ITUG Summit in Nice, France, where Prognosis was demonstrated running on a color monitor! However, attendance at NonStop events is only one avenue open to IR when it comes to promoting Prognosis. Industry events are where we get the opportunity to talk with Prognosis customers and prospects and where new opportunities for Prognosis can be readily identified. And NRF 2020 Vision didn’t disappoint – we saw badges on lanyards from well-known NonStop users including FIS, FiServ, First Data, Global Payments and more!
IRs presence at the event couldn’t be ignored and it gave attendees an opportunity to see demonstrations of Prognosis that was tailored to the retail industry. Retailers are proving to be no slouches when it comes to embracing new technology and we saw everything from facial recognition to virtual reality to simply wanting to know more about gaining better insights into the data that everyone today is capturing. Dashboards providing such insight were everywhere and in this regard, IR Prognosis didn’t disappoint. And yet, there was an overriding sense coming from retailers that they had to change and that their industry was under attack almost everywhere they turned.
“We are in a new era for retail technology and we have to look at a new cost curve for retailers. We have to change the old paradigm and become API-first, use community sourced software, use common tools, and leverage the cloud.” – David Wilkinson, Senior Vice President and General Manager Global Retail at NCR
“More than half of store sales involve online and a third of online sales involve a store. Analysts always want to know about our sales per channel and they have models built out for it, but I have yet to hear a customer ask me about our channels. Our business no longer operates this way.” – Erik Nordstrom, Co-President at Nordstrom
IR recognizes many of these issues and having the opportunity to talk to retailers highlighted the value proposition of Prognosis. No matter where your presence lies within the industry, be that a bricks and mortar outlet or a totally online enterprise, or whether you are in the transaction path as an acquirer, processor, merchant or financial institution, being able to monitor the transaction at every step along the transfer of goods for payment, “transaction monitoring is vital to combat service disruptions and potential lost revenues.
“Poorly performing systems lead to long queues, the likelihood of abandoned purchases, and dissatisfied customers – severely impacting your bottom line. But there are a lot of complicated moving parts in the digital payment process. A transaction that might only take a few seconds for a customer, really requires an intricate set of steps and components from initiation to completion.” – Janae Smith, Global Product Marketing Manager at IR
If as yet you haven’t had the opportunity to read the latest post to the IR blog by Smith, then you should take a look at her post, Payment transaction monitoring in a changing commercial world Should you have any difficulty following this hyperlink you can simply cut and paste this url into your browser –
Attending industry events like NRF 2020 Vision will continue to play an important part in IR’s outreach programs in support of Prognosis. Addressing the needs of industry verticals such as retailing helps IR better understand the underlying business drivers that more often than not, particularly among the bigger retailers, payments processors and financial institutions, are supported by solutions running on NonStop. With decades of experience helping NonStop users gain better business insights from data created on NonStop, Prognosis continues to be a trusted solution for many of them – Prognosis dashboards remain one of the most informative communication vehicles available today!
Should this topic of how best to monitor transactions generated by retailers be of interest to you don’t hesitate to reach out to your local IR contact; they would be only too happy to hear from you.
Written by the IR Team
Kevin Johnson,
VP Sales – Payments Performance Monitoring
www.ir.com
