The CMA 2014 Winners were very, very, happy!
This newsfeed is going out on Tuesday this week to miss the UK May Day bank holiday - just in case you were wondering. So, what has been happening last week? Well, if you could indulge me one more time, let me just say a word or two about our thoroughly successful CI Spring Conference and the Contactless & Mobile Awards which took place last Tuesday. A very big 'Thank You' to our sponsors, speakers and exhibitors and, of course, all who attended despite a tube strike that could have, in theory, totally shut us down. Luckily our attendees are made of sterner stuff and braved London above ground to join us.
And what a conference it was. Many thanks to Mike Tuckett from Transport for London, who, in his keynote, gave us a state of play on contactless and mobile payments as they related to London's public transport – as well as acting as an impromptu TfL information office on running and non-running tubes around the capital.
Mark Austin from Visa Europe also quietly announced that, without fanfare, 490 Tesco stores the previous day had switched on contactless yesterday. The largest contactless adoption since McDonald. He also expanded on the 'bump' in user awareness and adoption that normally accompanied such an event. It will be interesting to see the next batch of figures.
Many thanks to Owen Geddes from Appflare who took us through the worlds of NFC and Beacons and to Weve CEO David Sear. David made a statement at the beginning of his speech concerning customer attachment to their phones. Using a little audience interaction he asked everyone to take out their phones and hold them in the air. The audience happily did so. They were less accommodating when he asked everyone to swap their phone with a complete stranger. Point made. "Consumers don't care about payments unless they have to", he said. "They care about convenience and security."
The buzzing atmosphere of the day continued into the evening with the Contactless & Mobile Awards. It quickly became another night of fanfare, mayhem, tears (not really!) and, of course, many selfless as the 2014 Contactless Intelligence Contactless & Mobile Awards honored achievements across a wide range of sectors and countries throughout Europe and further a field. In its seventh year, the Awards attracted a record turnout of nominees , making it an important fixture in the contactless calendar. We’ve seen entry numbers grow year-on-year, which I like to think highlights the dynamism of this burgeoning industry. New for 2014 were two categories; ‘Contactless Payment Collaboration’ and ‘Retail’. We were happy to create these two new categories because we felt that these are two intrinsic areas that showcase what it takes to bring contactless and NFC technology to the general public.
This year’s CMA winners were:
- Contactless Payment Collaboration – Bank Polski (Poland)
- Retail – Heidi.com (Switzerland)
- Transportation and Ticketing – Transport for London (United Kingdom)
- Mobile Payment – BBVA (Spain)
- Innovation – Selinko (Belgium)
- Customer Experience – UBS Switzerland (Switzerland)
- Loyalty – Escher Interactive (Ireland)
- Public Domain – Vix Technology (Australia)
- Marketing Campaign – Thinaire (USA)
- Infrastructure – ATM / Smarting (Spain)
- Eco-System (sponsored by Samsung Semiconductor Europe) – Bell ID (Netherlands)
For the second time, there was an award open to all finalists – the Industry Choice Award. Voting was open to anyone who was willing to cast a vote. After a frenetic ten days voting, the emerging winner was individual entrant Ibrahim Serhat BULUT (Turkey).
“Visa is delighted to be sponsoring the Contactless and Mobile Awards again in 2014 and we are excited by the increase in the quantity and variety of nominations this year and in the level of innovation in mobile payments. During the past year we have witnessed a major transformation in the world of payments. Visa contactless payments are now available in twice as many European countries as this time last year and consumers have become increasingly comfortable using the technology, making over 340 million transactions in the past 12 months. We should not think the work is finished though and the next two to three years will be critical to the success of both contactless and mobile contactless. We all need to continue enhancing consumer awareness and extending availability to achieve the vision of a ubiquitous contactless solution,” said Mark Austin, Director of Contactless at Visa Europe (Sponsors of the CMAs).”
Visa Europe presented its Visa payWave award for Best Contactless Awareness and Education Campaign to Transport for London (UK) -picked up by Mike Tuckett and Terri Lynham, while Mark Ritzmann & Christian Wirtz from Vodafone took joint ownership of the Visa payWave Business Leader of the Year prize.
The number of firms that now want to talk about what they are doing with contactless globally is encouraging for the industry, but it makes the judges’ job tougher every year. We’re grateful for the time everyone spent analyzing the input in some very tough categories. There were some particularly strong entries in certain categories, such as Retail and Marketing Campaign which meant some of the results were incredibly close.
If our readers were at either event, I would recommend looking at the Contactless Intelligence website this week as we will have the impressions video online (perhaps you can spot yourself?) and the flickr photo stream of the event - including the winner selfies taken on stage (something that appears to be all the range at award shows these days!). Finally, we must be doing something right because we actually trended on Twitter last week, which means a lot of people were talking about the event and that MUST be a good thing!
Normal editorial content will resume next week.
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
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