Best Buy Europe, Blacks, Carpetright, eBay, Dixons, Kiddicare, Morrisons, Murco, Starbucks, Sonae and Waitrose all appearing at Retail Business Technology Expo

Best Buy Europe, Blacks, Carpetright, eBay, Dixons, Kiddicare, Morrisons, Murco, Starbucks, Sonae and Waitrose all appearing at Retail Business Technology Expo

The line up has been announced for the seminar programme at Retail Business Technology Expo, the brand new event focusing on business solutions and technology for the retail industry.

Its organisers said the event will provide visitors with an exhibition offering a comprehensive range of solutions, combined with 80 educational, inspiring, independent seminars, which are all free to attend, plus numerous networking opportunities, all under one roof.

With five seminar theatres, visitors will be able to listen to a range of presentations with topics covering; customer centricity, cloud computing, loss prevention, mobile retailing, Payment Card Industry (PCI) and payment security and social media tools.

Key retail technologists to speak

Keynote speakers include Gary Barr, Morrisons chief information officer and Mike Davies, Wipro Retail vice president, who will be providing an update on the Morrisons Evolve retail transformation programme, which is setting foundations for world class retailing; Pete Medcalf, eBay UK and Tony Bryant, K3 Retail business development manager, who will be discussing the opportunities and advantages of selling on third-party websites; Chris Howell, IT director for customer systems at Dixons Retail Group and Deri Jones, SciVisum chief executive, who will be discussing how Dixons Retail Group’s focus on “customer experience monitoring” is fundamental to winning on the internet, and Sonae and Wedo who will make a joint presentation, discussing the implementation of Business Assurance RAID software, to handle internal quality control processes and profit protection.

In the Microsoft Theatre, a series of seminars will run, addressing critical business challenges that retailers face, covering connected customer centricity, multichannel integration and hybrid cloud retailing solutions.

Covering all the retail bases

Over in the Cards & Payments Theatre, from payment members association Vendorcom, a range of topics including contactless and mobile payments, PCI payment and security and biometric security, with speakers including Catherine Tong, Tesco.com head of payments and online fraud prevention, who will be presenting “The Customer View of Mobile Payment,” and Philip Hellyer, Best Buy Europe enterprise architecture group lead, who will pose the question, “Can an end-to-end encryption payment solution reduce the burden of PCI DSS?”

The E-commerce Theatre, in association with e-retail trade body IMRG, will host presentations from BodyMetrics, with Suran Goonatilake explaining how ‘Body-Scanner’ takes 3D body-scans to produce a ‘digital twin’ of customers, and Nicola Ibberson from Yahoo! will discuss innovations in the online retailing market.

Retail Business Technology Expo will take place from 16 to 17 March 2011 at London’s Earls Court.