Over the past 5-10 years, the retail payments ecosystem has become increasingly complex. New channels and payment tenders have continued to expand promising consumer usage growth and loyalty. Issuing banks have begun offering incentive programs for merchants to prioritize routing and avoid interchange fees. All the while, regulations tighten to ensure compliance and protect consumer…
Author: wcapra
Targeting the Most Important Technology Investments
The following has been re-posted from Convenience Store News. The original article can be found here. Targeting the Most Important Technology Investments By Angela Hanson – 12/13/2018 NEWARK, N.J. — Technology touches nearly every aspect of convenience retailing today, from loyalty programs to promotions to the point of sale and beyond. As a result, convenience store…
Whitepaper: Data Privacy
From the Target and Home Depot breaches to Marriott’s most recent breach weeks ago, data breaches are becoming a near-daily part of the standard news cycle. In response to the increasing concern over consumer data privacy, numerous government entities are evaluating and drafting consumer data privacy protection laws. The European Union was a first mover…
Your project is ready for go-live. Is your project team ready?
This scenario has played out tens of thousands of times: your loyalty/mobile/fill-in-the-blank project, that your project team has been working on for months, is ready to go-live; eight months later, key members of that project team are still providing guidance as it relates to support, use, and everything else related to that project that supposedly…
Don’t Miss Your Future – Four Blind Spots that Retailers Need to Recognize
Since Marc Andreessen’s prediction in 2013 that “…retail guys are going out of business and ecommerce will become the place everyone buys…,”1 there has been a cascade of opinions and predictions about the digital disruption of retail. Hindsight teaches us that digital disruption is about more than technology. In spite of the dire predictions, incumbent…
The Challenges of Being a Marketing Professional
Being a marketer often feels like living in a Holiday Inn Express commercial. An employee you’ve never seen before walks up to your desk and offers some advice: “I think you should make the logo bigger and use some glitter.” “I’m sorry, you don’t look familiar. Are you new in the marketing department?” “No, I’m…
CaaS/MaaS – Crime as a Service/Malware as a Service
Technology has always proven to be a double-edged sword throughout history; as the world improves technology standards and efficiency, so do the bad guys. The latest iteration of threats come in the form of what we know today as SaaS, but are re-engineered for malicious purposes and redefined as CaaS (crime as a service). As…
NACS Show: Innovating Like a Start Up
The following originally appeared in Convenience Store Decisions and features W. Capra Senior Consultant, Jim Duboyce. Sheetz aims to empower an incubator team to strategize new initiatives for Sheetz that will position it for the future. In a Sunday, Oct. 7 educational session on innovating like a start up, Moderator Jim Duboyce, senior consultant, W. Capra Consulting,…
Loyalty Points to Ponder
The following originally appeared in Convenience Store Decisions and is written by W. Capra Executive Consultant, Ed Collupy. When considering a new loyalty program, asking the right questions can help you determine which option is best for your business. Many convenience operators have their own experiences they can rely on related to loyalty programs either from…
The MYTH of getting robbed from your pocket via Contactless Payments
While navigating on social media, I found a video around contactless fraud. The video warns people to be protective of their wallets as he initiated a contactless transaction with another person who carried his wallet inside his back pocket (you can see the video here). Of course, a video like this can generate reactions that…
Simple Security Tips for Consumers
We see a steady stream of news stories about data breaches that result in damage to company reputations, impact to share valuation, cost to implement new security measures and in many cases fines and/or penalties to cover the cost of associated fraud. In the payments and security world, we tend to focus on the IT…