STS was pleased to have held its first Technical User Group Seminar in the last week of February. With guests from Japan, USA, Germany, Spain, France as well as UK visitors, it was an opportunity to bring together partners of STS to discuss the future of smart card technology.
STS held 2 days of education and information. Guest speakers included large UK retailers, Boots and The Co-Operative as well as technology partners Glue4 and Votiva.
Catherine Curry from Boots provided an interesting insight into Boot's plans for the adoption of contactless payments. This session proved to be exceptionally well received as it filled in a lot of the information holes for technology providers. Catherine outlined potential uses for contactless, where it could provide savings for Boots, however also pointed out the lack of assistance and clear information that had been missed by different parties in the payments industry. It is essential for the industry to meet these needs to see success for contactless.
The other major retail speaking slot was filled by Lawrence Freeman from The Co-Operative Group. Lawrence's presentation provided a far-reaching overview of the challenges currently facing retailers today and how The Co-Operative Group are leading through innovation. Some important points were that they were seeing 25% of their transaction volume through self-checkout solutions and their new integrated vending machines which are significantly reducing queue times.
The main focus of Lawrence's presentation was their new survey solution using a combination of customer facing displays and PIN pads for survey entry. This function has been highlighted before in Smartlink, however the information Lawrence provided was a revelation to other technology providers and fellow retailers. The fact that The Co-Operative Group were able to save over £1.2m per annum through such a simple piece of innovation is a credit to the team at The Co-Operative Group.
Other discussion topics included NFC payments, collection of donations using payments, a look at the next wave of EMV payments around the world as well as hospitality, IP-based payments and under the cover of STS' SmartNS.
Feedback included:
"Good balance between technical detail and business application of the technology"
"Good opportunity to understand and mingle with suppliers & users in the card payments industry"