Retail and eCommerce highlights this week includes: SAP has announced that Barclaycard Payments has extended its relationship with SAP to make its payments gateway product, Smartpay, available to SAP customers across Europe. Episerver has invested in its Future with a new CMO and a new product to round out its digital Experience platform. We also have an review of industry reaction to the Chancellor’s Summer statement. Blue Yonder and Uber Freight have announced a partnership designed to help businesses build efficient and transparent global supply chains.
Barclaycard extends payment gateway partnership with SAP
SAP has announced that Barclaycard Payments has extended its relationship with SAP to make its payments gateway product, Smartpay, available to SAP customers across Europe.
Any business signed up to the SAP Commerce Cloud will be able to access Smartpay and take advantage of its benefits. This includes frictionless customer experience, bolstered fraud defences and a consistent payments offering across online and offline channels.
One of Smartpay’s chief benefits is its ability to power fast, smooth, flexible payments. The platform supports one-click purchases and allows buyers to use a variety of different cards, currencies and payment methods. In addition, Smartpay uses the latest anti-fraud approaches – such as machine learning – to detect fraudulent transactions in real-time and reduce false positives. This approach protects the business’ finances and minimises negative customer experiences such as payment declines.
For companies who rely on the SAP Commerce Cloud to do business, implementation of Smartpay is swift and easy, and it removes the need to have multiple integrations with different payment providers. In turn, this means that organisations can offer the same payment experience to their customers across all physical, digital and mobile channels.
The provision of Barclaycard’s Smartpay gateway to SAP’s European customers is the latest development in partnership between the two companies. In February 2019, a collaboration was unveiled which saw Barclaycard’s business-to-business payment solution, Precisionpay, incorporated into the SAP Ariba Network.
Episerver hires Kirsten Allegri Williams as new CMO
Episerver has appointed former SAP SuccessFactors CMO Kirsten Allegri Williams as its chief marketing officer and introduces the third of its solution pillars with the launch of Intelligence Cloud.
As CMO, Allegri Williams will lead global marketing and communications strategy at Episerver. She will manage the brand consolidation for Episerver’s acquisitions of Insite Software and content personalisation and analytics provider Idio. Both acquisitions accelerated Episerver’s product roadmap five-plus years and their teams are now fully integrated into the Episerver organisation. Idio functionality is now combined with Episerver’s existing data, recommendations and analytics capabilities to form the just-released Episerver Intelligence Cloud. The new Intelligence Cloud joins Episerver Content Cloud and Episerver Commerce Cloud to complete the end-to-end digital experience platform.
Episerver Intelligence Cloud cohesively groups Idio and Episerver’s rich website personalisation functionality. This includes product recommendations, email content and product recommendations, personalised search and navigation, visitor intelligence (first-party data). The solution also includes a customer data platform (first- and third-party data) – compliant with GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act.
More than 30 customers have already gone live on Intelligence Cloud. Episerver also moved Idio from Amazon Web Services to the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure. The company says it has resulted in sizeable improvements to savings, security, speed and scalability.
Hospitality tech industry reactions to UK Chancellor’s Summer statement
Matthew Stubbs, CEO BookingTek, which created the TableRes app said,
“This is welcome news from the Chancellor. At a time when many restaurants and pubs are in dire need of new customers to boost revenue. Key to this recovery process should also be the upgrading and installation of new technology. To ensure venues can offer speedy, safe and efficient service to people who are still fearful of the risks posed by the Covid-19 outbreak.
Stubbs continued, “This is easily achieved with contactless technology like order-pay mobile apps. They facilitate touchless payments, as well as enabling customers to order food and drinks via their phone. This eliminates the need to handle items like menus, bills and cards whilst also completely removing face-to-face contact.”
Sonny Sehgal, CEO, Transputec, which recently launched Thermavis, a new temperature checking technology added,
“As restaurants begin to reopen their doors, a key concern of all returning workers and customers will be their safety. This is exactly why core technology such as non-intrusive temperature checking cameras like Thermavis must be employed. Flagging individuals with a body temperature will be crucial in slowing the spread of Covid-19. Giving key workers peace of mind will be vital. This is an important line of defence, protecting them from working alongside infected individuals.”
Experts from Accountancy firm Menzies also gave their views on how this will impact business.
Blue Yonder and Uber Freight speed-up supply chain digital transformation
Blue Yonder and Uber Freight have announced a partnership designed to help businesses build efficient and transparent global supply chains. Digital transformation initiatives have accelerated, as enterprises that ship goods embrace flexible operations to keep up with shifting demand. Quickly recovering from supply shortages and creating a resilient business for the long term requires a well-managed, digitised supply chain. This also includes freight transportation.
As volatility increases across freight transportation markets, Blue Yonder and Uber Freight are working together to meet businesses’ varied logistics needs. The partnership will create new ways to ensure shippers can instantly tap into real-time services and a reliable capacity network, within the tools they already use. Uber Freight will integrate directly within the Blue Yonder Luminate Platform. This will support the dynamic pricing discovery solution. The solution provides quoting of real-time market-based prices and instant booking capabilities up to two weeks in advance of loads.
Blue Yonder’s Luminate Platform is powered by Microsoft Azure. It combines rich internal and external data from across a customer’s digital supply chain assets to allow for smarter, more actionable artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based business decisions.
Using an API, the dynamic pricing discovery solution will enable businesses who use the Blue Yonder transportation management solution to tap into a range of services. This includes automated execution, dynamic routing guides, and Uber Freight’s capacity network of 50,000 US and European freight carriers.
