How does your organization leverage transaction data?

Data-driven decision making has become pivotal in the corporate world. As consumers leverage a wide array of options to complete transactions, maintaining an awareness of those consumers, their spending habits, and their experience across business systems is critical to remaining competitive in the marketplace. Data is critical to those activities,...

Should You Bring Payments In-House?

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...

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...

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,...

What’s Holding Up Contactless Payments in the US?

Contactless payments in the US have been lauded for years as the next consumer payment trend. Aside from a few very large retailers and transit use in cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, however, there are not many merchants that accept contactless payments in today’s market. This post will...

Forecasting the Future of Digital Wallets

The question of digital wallet acceptance is a tired one – but for many merchants a decision they might want to reconsider.  Stored credentials, defined as a system or service that stores multiple payment methods for use across multiple websites, is not a new concept.  In fact, many would say...

The Cashless Trend

Several organizations are making changes to go cashless or at least pilot the concept, including Massachusetts’ MBTA, American and United terminals in select airports (Miami being the latest) and Shake Shack’s recently opened cashless location in New York, to name a few.  Living in the Seattle area, I have access...

Whitepaper: Managing Risk in Faster Payments Systems

Under direction from the Faster Payments Task Force (FPTF), the United States seeks to modernize its payments infrastructure and develop a new system which can provide safe, ubiquitous, and faster payment capabilities to all stakeholders in the payments value chain. The opportunities created by the instantaneous movement of money around...