Recap: Netcetera Innovation Summit 2019

The summit kicked off with back to back talks by Michael Seifert and Andrej Vckovski (of Netcetera GmbH and AG, respectively), showing how their company has evolved over the last years and also providing an outlook on what’s still to come – very interesting was the presentation of a proof of concept looking at additional use-cases for existing 3D Secure infrastructure, improving user experience and helping merchants reduce their carbon footprint at the same time.

The keynote was a highly professional presentation by Christoph Brunmayer of The Tale Studio about the growing GAFA domination, illustrating very vividly how big players are going more and more “360”, closing their ecosystems and thus improving customer access. Interesting takeaways were that Amazon today is already more relevant as a search engine for products than Google while being the largest employer in the tech industries. Their combination of “smart home” appliances through Alexa together with their Prime membership program that is constantly adding various services in different markets makes them a competitor for more and more verticals, far beyond retail only. At the same time, established players need to be careful not to become mere infrastructure providers, a trend that is apparently not yet taken seriously on a wider scale. GAFAnomics will surely be a topic to watch closely over the coming years.

Next up was block of more technical talks, from Darius Metzner of VISA providing an outlook of the next steps in terms of 3DS 2.x and when they will mandate the various versions to come, over Christian Waldvogel of Netcetera reviewing the journey to the SCA readiness up until version 2.0 to Pierre Jauffret of Wirecard giving a high-level overview of tokenization and its applications.

Particularly interesting for us was Metro AG’s Robert Herzig’s talk about self-scanning and self-checkout, highlighting how many moving parts are involved in such a scenario. Reassuring us that centralized risk management and interconnection between merchant loyalty programs and stored payment credentials are necessities in today’s retail market and also that more and more merchants are leaning towards their “own payment method” (think Uber cash or Metro Card rather than Credit Card).

Kurt Schmid and Stefan Penner of Netcetera followed with a typical Austrian “Doppelconference”, a very entertaining talk focusing on best practices in how to interface with the end-customer in terms of payments, a topic that very naturally leads to their colleague’s Thomas Fromherz overview of Secure Remote Commerce, which EMVCo has just released.
It was interesting to see how the schemes themselves are now looking to solve some of the same issues that our Payment Orchestration Platform already has solutions to, and SRC will surely be a topic that we will be watching closely in the near future as well.

Last but not least, Benno Häfliger of Netcetera Switzerland held a talk where he showed how Augmented Reality technology has evolved in recent years and how it can be applied to eCommerce and retail, with the potential to almost entirely remove the need for large stores, but also how to streamline the customer journey in existing outlets. As one of the first users of Google Glass, we realized that we probably were a bit ahead of the times back then, but we will surely let some of these insights influence our future product roadmap.

After that wave of information and a quick lunch, it was time for us to switch from business casual to Dirndl and Lederhosen and hop on the bus to the “Wiesn”. This part of the Summit was a very entertaining one as well, as you can see in our short recap video:

Checkout Netcetera's Recap for further information and photos here