Welcome to this lecture on digital communication using GNU radio. My name is Kumar Appaya and I belong to the Department of Electrical Engineering IIT Bombay. In this lecture, we will conclude our discussion of the Viterbi algorithm with an example. If you recall in the previous lecture, we computed an incremental metric and we claim that the incremental metric can be used to make decisions on the fly when you perform maximum likelihood sequence estimation. The incremental metric had this form. Just to remember the notation, the ZK was essentially obtained by taking the inner product of Y with SB at the KT time instant. And if you now look at the H, that was the autocorrelation of P's evaluated at KT. Let us now perform this for the example which we were looking at. If you recall for the example we were looking at, we obtained an effective P of T that had this form. The form was, this is 1, 2, 3, 4. The value here is minus half. It is half. The value here is 1. For this Pt, we are going to now perform the Viterbi algorithm for a certain example. But as a prerequisite, we need to compute H at 0, H1, H2 and so on. So, let us actually compute our values of H for this. H0, in this case everything is real and we will assume BPSK as well, is integral P of T, we are going to P star of T to P's T square. This is very easy to evaluate. It is, if you look over here, the value is 1, the value is half, the value is minus half. So, you get 1 plus 1 by 4 plus 1 by 4, that is 3 by 2. That is your H0. Now, for H1, you have to be careful. To compute H1, we can just do integral P of T and P of T minus capital T, remember the rate of signaling capital T is essentially 2. We have half a symbol per second. To do this integral, we can just shift this by 2. So, I am going to now delay this by 2. Put 1 here, half here, minus half here. So, if you now perform this overlap integral, it is very evident that this 1 multiplies by minus half and you get minus half. And this is also equal to H of minus 1 conjugate, which is H of minus 1. In this case, it is real. And interestingly, in this case, there is nothing much else that you have to do. This is essentially all that you have. Now, let us move ahead. This lambda k B k S k gives you the incremental metric for the transition from S k to S k plus 1. Now, we are going to use this. So, let me just take this below, make a copy. I am just going to make a copy and paste it. And we are going to now perform an example. And the example that we are going to perform is one where we are going to use PPSK. We are going to assume that B 0 is always plus 1. Then, we have these sequence of received Ys. Y 0 is minus 1. Y 1 is 2. Y 2 is minus 2. Y 3 is 1.5. This is what is received. Y 0 does not really matter because we know B 0 is 1 already. We will use Y 1, Y 2 and Y 3 to figure out what sequence was sent. To do this, we are going to draw what is called a Trellis diagram of the states. What is a Trellis diagram? In this case, we have BPSK. So, let us actually draw our Trellis diagram. I am going to draw for B 0, what are the possible values it takes plus 1? Nothing else. For B 1, what are the possible values it takes? Plus 1 or minus 1. Now, if you look at the interpretation of that incremental metric, that was about going from B SSK to SK plus 1. So, in this case, we were going from S 1 to S 2 and that can be using B 1 or B 2. That is basically the interpretation. For B 2, 2 states, for B 3, 2 states and so on. Now, the actual thing we have to do is to compute the matrix which are going to come here and that is what we are going to do using this particular expression. Now, let us look at this expression for the application here. Now, in the initial computation, we are going to simplify this because there are some observations which we are going to make. Mod BK square is always 1 for BPSK. In fact, for any quam, it does not matter. So, and H 0 is a fixed number. This term can go away. Similarly, in our case, what is our capital L? Our capital L is 1. Why? Because we computed H, it had only a dependence on L equal to 1. So, we have our autocorrelation sequence essentially was minus half 1 half and minus half 1 minus half. So, this has a dependence only on 1. So, it is actually m is equal to surprisingly k minus 1 to k minus 1. It has only one term. So, our incremental metric actually gets simplified significantly. So, our incremental metric if you simplify this will turn out to be, maybe I will write it below. Over here it is B star k z k. B star k z k and remember your z k is basically what you get from the y. It is B star k z k minus and you have real part of B star k. In this case, the real part goes away, the conjugate goes away. It is B k times it is B k minus 1 H 1. Therefore, this number is actually half, this number is B k minus 1 and this number is just B k. Therefore, our simplified expression is going to be lambda k B k s k. I can just simplify it easily. I am just going to write my z as y directly. So, I am just going to write this as B k y k. The middle term goes away because it was just 1 always and why did I write this? Because this was minus half actually I mean I am sorry minus half sorry because H 1 was minus half this is a minus and minus that became plus half. So, now this became my metric B k y k plus half B k B k minus 1. Now, let us look at the values we got minus 1 2 minus 2 1.5. Now, we are going to write our first metric lambda k B 0 s k. What is the metric if the B 1 is actually plus 1? Let us write it B k is equal to plus 1. Then, what is the metric?  So, if B k is plus 1 and I think my y 0 as I am sorry y 1 is 2 I am so sorry if you remember y 1 is 2 that is the mistake I made. So, I am sorry let me correct this. So, let us do this again B k is plus 1. So, 2 plus and B k is plus 1 half is 2.5. Let us compute the branch metric for the other approach with B k is minus 1 actually B 1 I wanted to write B 1 over here it is actually correct it ok. So, this is B 1 if B 1 is minus 1 what do I get y is still 2 and B 1 is minus 1. So, minus 2 and B 0 is plus 1. So, minus half this is minus 2.5. So, what I am going to do is in this particular trellis diagram I am actually going to write these metrics because these are the metrics that I am going to see I essentially want to maximize this quantity this lambda B. So, I am going to write these on the bar over here. So, 2.5 for going here minus 2.5 I am going here. So, what does this mean? The branch metric based on the y I got for going from plus 1 to plus 1 is 2.5 for plus 1 to minus 1 B 1 being minus 1 is 2.5.  Therefore, you cannot make an incremental decision at this stage you have to go to the next stage and then check. So, let us actually do that ok. Now, let us suppose that B 1 is plus 1 or B 1 is minus 1 and check out all the transitions that can occur based on this. Now, if you remember in our expressions for in our discussion we said that one symbol depends only on the next symbol that manifests evidently over here because we have only one hop dependence. So, B 1 depends on B 0 B 2 depends on B 1.  So, B 1 will say S yeah will say B 1 S 1 yes ok. Now, what do we do? We are going to say if B 2 is plus 1 if B 2 is minus 1 and we are going to use this expression again. The only thing is our y, y is minus 2. So, y is minus 2. So, let us make the substitution ok y is minus 2 B 2 is plus 1. So, minus 2 and this is minus 1 times what is the previous yeah ok. So, we are going to have 4 matrix I am sorry yes. So, we need 4 matrix I am sorry yeah. Now, because we have to check for 1 to minus 1 to minus 1 minus 1 to plus 1 and so on.  So, since our y 2 is minus 2 we have in this case B 2 is plus 1 minus 2 and over here the product is plus 1 1.5. Next B 1 is plus 1 B 2 is minus 1. So, let us put it here B 2 is minus 1. So, minus 1 times 2 is 2 plus and we have half times this product that is minus. So, 1 to minus 1 we have 1.5 next we will do this 1 minus 1 plus 1. So, B 2 is plus 1.   So, 2 plus and minus 1 to minus 1 half 2.5. So, now these 4 metrics can be entered into the trellis 1 1 corresponds to minus 1.5 let us do that. So, I am going to write minus 1.5 over here let me write it more neatly. Similarly, 1 minus 1 corresponds to 1.5. So, 1 to minus 1 corresponds to 1.5. Next minus 1 to 1 corresponds to minus 2.5. Finally, minus 1 to minus 1 corresponds to 2.5 ok. Let us now pause for a minute these increments are additive that is what we proved in the previous lecture.   So, for plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 is both of these branches combined here you can make the decision that among these 2 only 1 of them is optimal that is this one not the other one because the metric for this is larger. But now there is a merging of 2 different trellis paths in minus 1 also.  Therefore, at here this is the optimal path, but you cannot make a decision among these 2 paths right away because further sequences also have a role why B 2 remember depends on S 3 as well that is B 2 has some part of its information going to the next symbol. So, you cannot make these decisions, but what you have already done is you have said of the 1, 2, 3, 4 trellis paths available only 2 are surviving in other words only these 2 are the likely sequence patterns that I am going to hold till time 2. Of course, later on you can if there they you know the if the metrics diverge significantly you can make decisions of course, but these are the 2 surviving paths. Let us just do one more step ok y 3 is 1.5 let me now do lambda k lambda k P 2 S 2 that is this metric indicates what we go to the next ok. Now, let us do the same thing I am just going to write my y my y is y 3 is minus y 3 is 1.5 I do not I have to check the sign 1.5 y 3 is 1.5.  So, this is going to give me 1.5 plus half which is 2 this is going to give me minus 1.5 minus half which is minus 2 this is going to give me 1.5 minus half which is 1 and this is going to give me minus 1.5 plus half which is minus 1.  So, this is minus 1 this is plus 1. Now, let us compute the matrix for the others also let us compute the matrix. So, now over here there are 2 surviving paths. So, for the straight on path to go from plus 1 to plus 1 is actually going to be 2.5 to minus 1 2.5 minus 1.5 is 1 plus 2 is 3. Then if you now look at this particular path and if you now look at 2 if you ok let us look at this path and these this path merge over here.  Therefore, this is the only path that is going to survive and this path essentially goes away. But there is also one more possible path over here which you have to take into account 2.5 plus 1.5 minus 1 that gives you 3. These two paths are surviving because the other goes away. Why is this decision correct? The reason is because even if you keep going further and further the matrix at the points where the paths merge are not going to essentially change because as you make decisions in future you do not need to revisit these past matrix because the decisions about these symbols can be made based on the information that you have. So, therefore over here for example because both the optimal paths traverse this route you can safely say that the optimal decision for B2 is minus 1 and the optimal decision for B1 is 1. Even when the paths do not merge if at some points they merge you can make decisions if they do not start merging you can still stop at some point and try to make optimal decisions based on the branch matrix. This algorithm is the celebrated Witterbie algorithm which is used for maximum likelihood sequence estimation. It is also used in hidden Markov model based applications wherein you have these situations where a continuous stream of inputs is being made available to you and you are computing a probabilistic metric that allows you to optimize. So, in this manner you can actually revisit the derivation of this Witterbie algorithm you rather the branch matrix and then see how you can put these on a trellis and the trellis essentially allows you to make computations implementing these is very easy into to do in python. For example, you can just search on it you will find Witterbie algorithm implementations for python. This exact implementation we are not going to do in GNU radio directly because of the fact that implementing this in GNU radio is rather cumbersome and tedious. Instead one step that we are going to further make is to say that okay maximum likelihood sequence estimation is good but can I do something simpler? Okay if you want to do that then you have to make a realization. So, realization is that maximum likelihood sequence estimation is optimal whatever other method you want to use will be suboptimal. Now even though MLSD maximum sequence estimation can be done you still want to use some other methods it could be because even this complexity is too much for you to implement and you are okay with some other method where you just have to let's say deconvolve the channel or find out the symbols in some other way which could be suboptimal. So that is what we will be seeing in further lectures. So to summarize we have basically done the branch metric related computations and the MLSE is the optimal detection strategy in AWGN but if you recall a naive strategy that is trying out all possible combinations of symbols requires exponentially many computations. In the example that we discussed you required 4 power thousand computations for thousand QPSK symbols which was prohibitive. So by breaking the computation down we can exploit combinations and sequences that is if you get incremental metrics and then compute you can make decisions on the fly as you as and when you start observing some patterns that okay this is the optimal decision path that you have to take. Now the subsequent discussions are okay Viterbi algorithm is great but are there some simpler and easier to implement methods that we can use to make our decisions on symbols that is going to be our next task. So in summary while Viterbi algorithm is optimal there are suboptimal algorithms also which can come in handy and that is what we are going to see in the subsequent lectures. Thank you.


My name is Ekta Patel and for those of you who don't know me I am Ilri's Bioscience Communications Manager. I consider myself to be a unique species and how so because I come from an Indian background and if you know many Indians in East Africa then you know that most Indians go into businesses and unlike my family I decided to pursue my passion in molecular and cellular biology and genetics and became a scientist. So for nearly 10 years I've been working in the lab and like many of you here today I understand that feeling and excitement of taking your gel to check if there was a band or if your negative and positive controls are the way they're supposed to be and there's no contamination. And my favorite moment was when we were making some bacterial mutants and knocking genes out I couldn't sleep the entire night because I couldn't wait to get into the lab the next day just to check if my transfections had worked. So that's me and many many years passed that way until one day my supervisor who many of you may know Phil Toy my former supervisor said to me that we're going into the field this time and we're taking the vaccine that we made at Aelri we made a vaccine for the cattle disease known as East Coast fever and we're going to take this vaccine and go into the field and see how it works. And the prospect of him even suggesting that we needed to go to the field and I thought well what is a molecular biologist going to do in the field? I had convinced myself that I belong with my pipettes in the lab where I make magic happen. I was not excited and I don't know if he knows that but I said okay I'm gonna be positive and I'm gonna go because this is not when you put up a fight and I'll tell you something it pretty much changed a lot of things. So what happened is we decided to take a four and a half hour drive to Tanzania and stayed in the town of Arusha and early the next morning we got up and we went and drove another hour into a Maasai village in the town of Monduli. The planes were bare and vast and it was a cold morning and in the distance where they were the Maasai were staying you could see them coming out in their sort of traditional mud huts with their traditional garments also looking very cold and as you get closer to these the Maasai community what happens is anyone that's so hospitable says hey come in you know have a seat but you sit on stones and so we sort of made ourselves comfortable and then something interesting happens so when you go to someone's house they make an offering and they said we're gonna give you some special Maasai tea and I see this Maasai lady pouring out special Maasai tea in our cups from a gourd and I'm completely freaking out at this point because Maasai drink milk with blood and I thought am I is this is this what it's coming down to like you know and I'm looking at Phil and I'm looking at the other vets and the colleagues and then they take a sip of this tea and I look at them and I see no one's sort of passing out or dying you know it doesn't look like tea it doesn't smell like tea but you know I force myself to take a gulp and then I'll be very honest with you I was still looking at a way to like you know disposing the rest of it fortunately for me you know the specks of Sun were coming through and the cattle were gathering near the Bhomas and the Maasai the rest of the Maasai were coming through so I got excited and I thought you know what I'm gonna be done before I know it and we started walking closer to the Bhomas and as we were getting closer to the Bhomas I noticed something I noticed the smell of damp soil mixed with sort of cattle feces and I was also accosted by flies so many flies and the flies would sit on my pen and they would sit on my chart sheet and you know I was just sort of waving my hand around trying to make sure the flies didn't sit on me and I see the women and the children playing around and they've got flies all over them so a little baby and the baby's face and nose was all covered with flies there's nothing I could do about it and they didn't seem too bothered by this nevertheless our our task of our field travels coming to an end and the Maasai men decided that they are going to honor us and celebrate this by letting us eat with them and generally they don't allow the women to sit with the men so we all gathered around a tree and and sat in a circle and the translator there said to us that you know traditionally they don't allow the women to sit but we're so grateful for the vaccine that you've brought to our village and we want to show our appreciation and the next thing we know is that this young Maasai man comes and stabs the earth with the with with a cooked piece of roast meat from some animal that I don't even know and and we're all supposed to eat and and I said oh my god my thoughts were running away with me and I thought I didn't want anything I don't get me wrong I appreciate the hospitality I'm grateful but really I didn't want any of it and the translator asked me that you know what's with why are you so reluctant and I didn't know how to explain that I was out of my comfort zone and would you believe it that that was on the end of the trip I ended up going back there a couple of more times this time I took some non-toxic fly traps with me because I had them sitting around you know Indian people do business and so we had some that we were sourcing from somewhere and I decided to take these fly traps to this community and they worked like magic they were so happy and somehow I earned the name Miss Chana Inzi and every time I'd go back to Manduli they just call me Miss Chana Inzi which means fly girl or fly girl yes so having found a solution to one of their problems the Maasai lady decided to take me into her hut and you know I bent down to get into the doorway and I was it was dark in it's not like dark and she wanted to show me where the family slept so they slept on a bed made out of cow dunk which was at the height of a normal bed and they put a they put a sheet there and I didn't know what she was showing me this but she said something's biting their head and if I could find a solution for that and I'm so ashamed to say this to all of you but I just couldn't wait to get out of there I mean was it lice was it mites was it ticks you know what if it got in my head so I just want to shut up the point is I did not help this Maasai woman and that was probably the last time I ended up back in Manduli that felt completely inadequate in that environment and I went away taking a hard look at something I looked at all of my sort of inflexibilities and the hang-ups that I have and I paired it with all of my textbook knowledge of being a microbiologist and a molecular geneticist and whatever else and then I looked at sort of the needs of the pastoralist communities and I couldn't help but ask the question that how is I as a scientist going to make a difference to the people and their livestock if I wasn't willing to make the change myself so I understood that I needed to change the way I understand things first so most of you are going to say that now as I serve Illry as a communication manager I'm hoping to influence decision-makers but that's not the way that I see it I strongly believe that my main job is to in my main job is to and the critical success factor that I contribute to it is getting the science right because without the communications we cannot get the science right so for those of us who are fortunate enough to spend part or most of our life on the African continent we need to understand the harshness as well as the rich resources that this continent offers to us and having said that I look forward to working with all the scientists and all the non-scientists to make a difference and fulfill all the research that we serve to get our science right and these days I look forward to drinking more of that special mass IT thank you very much


Hi, this is Dr. Don. I have for you a linear optimization, a linear programming problem, and we're going to solve it using Excel with the solver add-in. Now this particular problem uses binary constraints, binary decision variables. So it's a little more interesting than the standard. We have a company that's budgeting and they're given the R&D vision, a challenge that they've got seven research projects that they would like to fund, but there's not enough people and not enough money to go around for all seven of the projects. So they've got to figure out which of the projects to fund in order to maximize return, maximize profit. Now they've developed this table with the seven projects, the number of engineers, the staff that's required from within the company, and then they've got some outside consulting costs for each of the seven projects. And then if they complete the projects, they will earn a profit shown in this row. So let's go over and set it up to use Excel solver. I've brought over that table at the top and I've added over here the first part the decision variables that we're going to use. We've got seven projects, so you would have seven variables and these are going to be our decision variables, but they're a special kind, they're binary. Think about it, you can either fund a project or not fund a project. It's either on or off and we model that using binary variables, a zero for off, a one for on. So I've set up a row here with my decision variables and I like to have ones in there when I'm building the model just so I can see them more clearly what's going on. As far as engineers use, I'm just going to click in this cell and we are going to take equal and we're going to take our decision variable and then multiply that times the number of engineers and it enter and then I can just drag that over to get that equation, that formula copied across for all of those in that row. Do something similar for budget, equal decision variable times the, consulting cost, if we use that hit enter, I got 230,000 and of course we just copy that across. Now finally we look at the profit, we do the same thing, equal decision variable, yes or no, times that profit, enter, that's 590 and I'm just going to copy that across. So that's a big part of our decision model. Our objective function, that's the big equation we're trying to solve, would just be to maximize profit and so we've got the profit earned if we did all seven of those. So we're just going to sum that up, I'm going to hit equal sum, double click that to select it and I'm going to sum up those seven projects, the profit and those seven, enter. So theoretically if I could do all seven projects I would get 3.855 million dollars in profit but I can't do all seven and down here for our constraints we set them up traditionally in a left-hand side and a right-hand side with the math operator we need in between. So our left-hand side would be the engineers used, again it's sum equal and I'm going to take my engineers use row and sum that up. So I would use 57 and of course I've got a maximum of 35 from the problem statement. Do the same sort of thing for the consulting budget equal sum, double click and my consulting budget right there, enter. So now I've got my left-hand side of my constraints and my right-hand side they're both left standard equal. So now we need to set up Solver. I'm going to go over here and click on Solver and we get our dialog box open up there. We want to set the objective cell, click in there and my objective function is there. I want to maximize, so I'm going to select that and then we've got our decision variables, select then that box and then just drag across to select that range. Now I've got to add my constraints. So I'm going to click on add and the first one is the number of engineers. So my left-hand side cell reference, 57, math operator less than or equal, there's our options and our right-hand side is 35. So I'm going to add another one and now we've got our consulting budget of 1.655, again less than or equal and then our right-hand side and then finally I've got to add my binary constraints. My cell references are these decision variables and we want them to be binary, yes or no. So that's it, I can click okay and down at the bottom we check to make sure that we've got unconstrained variables as non-negative, we're going to use the basic non-linear engine and just click solve. Okay, we've got our solution. I'm going to go ahead and select the answer report real quick, click okay and we get the answer report. We look down at the bottom here, we can see our constraints. Engineers is not constrained, we've got a slack of one engineer's not binding and then of course our consulting budget, we've got some slack there again, $130,000 is not binding. So we go back to Solver tab to get our solution. You can see we've got a zero for project one, a one for project two, so we're going to do project two, three and four, we've got a zero for project five, so we don't do five, we do six and we don't do seven. So we've got one, two, three, four projects we do and of course that gives us our 2.575 million dollars of profit that the most we can get, 34 out of our 35 engineers and 1.07 million out of our 1.2 million budget for consulting. So I hope this helps.


Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to another Stephen King book review and if you're sitting there going, hey, he's reviewed all of Stephen King's books up until this point, you are drastically wrong. I'm kidding. I'm actually speaking for myself because I thought I had and I'm missing about 50 reviews, the Thursday theorists and all of the newer content from Sleeping Beauties onward. I have reviews for those but I don't have reviews for a lot of them. So today we are starting with The Stand. The original edition, it's like 800, let's see here, I'm going to go through here real quick, 800 and 17, let's see here, 823 pages long. So this version of The Stand is much, much shorter than the 1994, I believe it was, reissue that incorporated all of the stuff that Stephen King had to cut, double day made him cut because they simply could not produce a book of that length at that time. Another thing to note is this is the first edition of the book and it is considerably smaller than other, it's not a book club edition, it is the same size as a book club edition, but when his first four or five books were released, I'm talking about Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand and Night Shift, all of those books, double day didn't really have a whole lot of confidence in him, so they released them in the same size as the book club edition and the only difference was, of course, one of them was marked book club edition. But this is the story of the survivors of a disease called Captain Trips. It has been adapted twice, both times, many series. The first one, I believe, was Mick Garris, the second one. One of the show leaders was Josh Boone, numerous people worked on the most recent one, but Josh Boone was one of the show runners. Now the story for me works for the most part up until they get to Boulder, my only, I still give this book five stars, but you know me, I'm all about the criticisms, so by the time it gets to Boulder, I really get tired of reading about the reconstruction, the rebuilding of society. I much prefer the stuff in Las Vegas during that timeframe. The main antagonist here is Randall Flagg, who is all throughout the Dark Tower series. I've already done my Thursday theorist for this book, I did it quite some time ago. So Randall Flagg is bringing on, well I don't know that he brought it on, but he is amassing a group of bad guys to wage war on Boulder, where the, Boulder, Colorado, where Mother Abigail and all of the other good survivors, the protagonists of the story, are gathering. And then they rebuild society, but my only criticism about this book is that section of the book. Now talking about characters, my favorite character in this book is Nick Andros, Tom Cullen is second on that list, and their interactions are my favorite parts of the book. I'm not going into spoiler territory, I don't want to go into spoiler territory here, but if you would like a spoiler review of this book, let me know. Also, the reason I'm redoing these reviews, well not redoing, doing, finally doing video reviews, all of my written reviews are up on Goodreads, but I want these reviews on the channel also, and I want to make very clear that yes, these are old books. Also I'm not a huge fan of Old King, I know that's crazy, some of my, I would say pre-80s King, and some of the 80s stuff also, but I'm a much bigger fan of his work now, and I also like the extended edition better. The reason for that is most of, I think all of the content concerning the kid, Trash Can Man, and you know, the kid is absent from this version of the book. There's a lot of great content in here, especially the traveling sections at the beginning when Captain Trips is wiping everything out, a standout section is of course the tunnel, one of my favorite parts of the book, then later on when they're road tripping again, where the, when the good guys are traveling to Las Vegas to have the, to stand, you know, to have the final standoff, that was a huge, that was another favorite part of mine, but the book is never as good as the beginning, and that's of course my own subjective opinion, and the ending, it can be said that the ending of the book is phoned in, and it's just a huge duest machina, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that right, I try to stay away from that term because of that, but it can say that it was phoned in or that it did not, it didn't fit with everything else, it can be said that it does fit because of the huge theme of religion circulating throughout the book, I personally don't like the ending, I know many people do, but me personally I do not like the ending, but that's not to say that this book isn't amazing, the book is great, it is a feat to behold that he was able to make the book interesting throughout the entirety of it, this one I will be reviewing the uncut version when we get to it, I plan on going in order across here, but if you have not read this, and it doesn't matter what genre you like, because all the genres are in here, you have horror, you have love and romance, you have damn there anything you could possibly think of, even some science fiction and even some fantasy in the sections where they're all dreaming, so you have some surreal aspects, some real aspects, but where King shines as he always balances the surreal aspects with the, you know, what is it, the corporeal aspects, the real-life aspects, and this is a fantastic book, it's not one of my favorites, but it is a fantastic book and I highly recommend that you read it, if you have not, or reread it if you want to, I'm not sure if I have the time for this or not, but I've been thinking about this for a long time, reading the original version and reading the uncut version back to back or at the same time and finding all the differences, I'm hoping all that will be included in the Cemetery Dance Double Day gift edition that I'll be receiving at some point in time, they're so slow with these things, but if you guys want to see me do a side-by-side comparison to the original version, this one, and the 1994 uncut version, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. Also, let me know whether or not you love this book, whether or not you hate it, whether or not you felt meh about it, I'd love to hear from you, but tell me why you felt that way about the book so that we can have a discussion. Until next time, I have been E, you have been U, this has been another Stephen King review, I'll talk to you guys later, bye-bye.


Well, after that intro, I can skip whatever I had planned to say, but I'm super excited to be here today with all of you guys. It's my first work camp. And as you heard, I've been in payments a really long time. So what I'm going to talk about today, we'll have a payments bend to it. So with that, I will jump right in, assuming that I can get the clicker of correct here. So we'll talk about the state of e-commerce and some of the themes that we see that are impacting it. And how we see those changing. And in particular, payments as an enabler to those. And then finally, how you or your merchants that you may support and help enable how they can win. So probably an understatement to say that commerce is a constantly changing landscape. But I think at no point has that probably been more true than in the last few years. And we would all agree with that. The lines of physical and digital were converging long before. But the rate at which we saw that convergence happen, I think over the last three years, has probably been unprecedented to say the least. And we see that as a result, shopping experiences for consumers have changed rapidly. And what they consider as the benchmark for what a great experience should and can be, I think has changed drastically in that period of time. And really what I believe is that COVID obviously just accelerated this change that was already happening. But again, at an unprecedented pace of change that we've never really seen before. And I'll give maybe an example of that in a bit. So the obvious physical and digital world have obviously converged. I'm going to put my glasses on here just for a bit. So consumers want to be able to shop from anywhere in the world, be able to have access to inventory probably more rapidly than ever expected before. And for the most part, technology has delivered on that. They expect to be able to shop across mobile, social, digital, physical, and even geographic channels.  And while that's not sort of language that a consumer would probably use to describe why it is that they like or don't like an experience, I think it's sort of at the heart of a lot of the things that we are seeing that are increasing in popularity. Buyers have more choice than ever in how they shop, how they pay. Options that are increasing flexibility for them and convenience are really the ones that I see gaining a lot of traction. And I'll talk a little bit about that. So throughout these slides, we'll try to kind of orient around three key points. The first around access, the ability to shop across multiple channels and multiple touch points. And then the next on relevance and efficiency and the flexibility and convenience. So shopping expected to be accessible anytime, anywhere. And like I said, technology largely has allowed us to do that. We hit a few hiccups with COVID. And I think we all saw supply chains converge and delivery times take a little bit longer and our patients changed. But we have a short memory and I think we're coming right back to those really heightened expectation levels. And again, that convergence across physical and digital. And it's not just that convergence that I think of that, but I think about the flywheel effect that builds. So we all saw that wallet adoption, the use of something like an Apple Pay or a Google Pay pre-pandemic was really quite small at the point of sale. We all began to use it at the point of sale. And then what we saw was that flywheel effect that actually transcended back online into buyer behaviors. And so we're seeing this sort of reinforcing behavior between digital and physical. And then social, the rise of social, no surprise, it's part of everyone's everyday life. But I don't know about you guys. I sort of remember five years ago, 10 years ago, maybe 10 is too long. But like at what point was commerce actually going to happen on social? And it sort of wasn't really happening. And then lo and behold, it seems to have sort of exploded and we'll double click on that one a little bit more. And then I think really underpinning everything is really mobile and that that has become the technology that has enabled this convergence of physical and digital, the rise of social and some of the other trends that I'll talk about. So we all knew pre-COVID these were converging physical and digital. Just how much? I think obviously accelerated 73% of shoppers now preferring to shop across multiple touch points. And that acceleration, I believe, is really sort of, we always had early adopters, folks that were going to use multiple channels, that were going to use wallets, that were using these enabling technologies. But what COVID brought was those sort of late adopters, the last use cases, the folks that were reluctant to shop online. It brought the everyday spend, groceries, gas. It brought things that traditionally would not have been used in an online context. And through that time, muscle memory gets created. And so again, we have that convergence or that flywheel between offline and online, helping to sort of drive those behaviors. I'll cite here from Digital Commerce 360 and they said, obviously e-commerce going fast before COVID-19 hit but the pandemic pushed more consumers to spend online, more frequently, and to spend more. And then I think what we're also seeing is that these customers that shop across channels are some of the most valuable and some of the most highly engaged. Google says that omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those that use one channel. And customer retention is 90% higher for omnichannel. So omnichannel may not transcend for every business and for every use case. But what probably does transcend and for us all to think about is how can we drive engagement with our customers across different interaction points and different channels for communication. And for some of us, and for some businesses, obviously there is that both retail and online and how we can help facilitate that more. And where that is not applicable, definitely looking at just how we drive engagement across different methodologies. So we mentioned social commerce on the rise and data shows us that this is already at 45.7 billion dollars in the U.S. And it's expected to grow at a compound annual rate there pretty quick. And that's just in the U.S. Actually internationally it's expected to grow much, much faster or much larger. By 2025 globally it's supposed to be $1.2 trillion that'll be enabled on social. So it is happening and it's happening quickly. And some of the things that I find interesting here, not at all surprised that, what is it, that 67% or 55% of social media users ages 18 to 24 made a purchase, not surprising. I have one of those in my household. I make lots of purchases on social. But I was stunned to see one third aged 65 and plus are also shopping on social. So I found that one kind of surprising. Couple stats around here that I think are interesting. So U.S. users on average 30 minutes a day, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. Not collectively each, 30 minutes each, that's a lot of time. Instagram says that their survey, 60% of people found out about their products on Instagram now, that's pretty big, 60%. People are not going to the mall anymore. Facebook survey, 62% of respondents said that they were, and I think we all saw supply chains converge and delivery times take a little bit longer and our patients changed. But we have a short memory and I think we're coming right back to those really heightened expectation levels. And again, that convergence across physical and digital. And it's not just that convergence that I think of that, but I think about the flywheel effect that builds. So we all saw that wallet adoption, the use of something like an Apple Pay or a Google Pay pre-pandemic was really quite small at the point of sale. We all began to use it at the point of sale. And then what we saw was that flywheel effect, that actually transcends back online into buyer behaviors. And so we're seeing this sort of reinforcing behavior between digital and physical. And then social, the rise of social, no surprise, it's part of everyone's everyday life. But I don't know about you guys, I sort of remember five years ago, 10 years ago, maybe 10 is too long, but like at what point was commerce actually going to happen on social? And it sort of wasn't really happening. And then lo and behold, it seems to have sort of exploded and we'll double click on that one a little bit more. And then I think really underpinning everything is really mobile. And that has become the technology that has enabled this convergence of physical and digital, the rise of social and some of the other trends that I'll talk about. So we all knew pre COVID, these were converging physical and digital, just how much I think obviously accelerated 73% of shoppers now preferring to shop across multiple touch points. And that acceleration I believe is really sort of, we always had early adopters, folks that were going to use multiple channels, that were going to use wallets, that were using these enabling technologies. But what COVID brought was those sort of late adopters, the last use cases, the folks that were reluctant to shop online, it brought the everyday spend groceries, gas, it brought things that traditionally would not have been used in an online context. And through that time, muscle memory gets created. And so again, we have that convergence or that flywheel between offline and online, helping to sort of drive those behaviors. I'll cite here from Digital Commerce 360, and they said, obviously e-commerce going fast before COVID-19 hit, but the pandemic pushed more consumers to spend online, to spend online more frequently, and to spend more. And then I think what we're also seeing is that these customers that shop across channels are some of the most valuable and some of the most highly engaged. Google says that omnichannel shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than those that use one channel. And customer retention is 90% higher for omnichannel. So omnichannel may not transcend for every business and for every use case, but what probably does transcend and for us all to think about is how can we drive engagement with our customers across different interaction points and different channels for communication. And for some of us, and for some businesses, obviously there is that both retail and online and how we can help facilitate that more. And then where that is not applicable, definitely looking at just how we drive engagement across different methodologies. So we mentioned social commerce on the rise, and data shows us that this is already at 45.7 billion dollars in the U.S. And it's expected to grow at a compound annual rate there pretty quick. And that's just in the U.S. Actually internationally it's expected to grow much, much faster or much larger. By 2025 globally it's supposed to be 1.2 trillion dollars that'll be enabled on social. So it is happening and it's happening quickly. And some of the things that I find interesting here, not at all surprised that, what is it, that 67% or 55% of social media users ages 18 to 24 have made a purchase, not surprising. I have one of those in my household. They make lots of purchases on social. But I was stunned to see one third, age 65 and plus, are also shopping on social. So I found that one kind of surprising. Couple stats around here that I think are interesting. So U.S. users on average 30 minutes a day. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. Not collectively each, 30 minutes each. That's a lot of time. Instagram says that their survey, 60% of people found out about their products on Instagram now. That's pretty big, 60%. People are not going to the mall anymore. Facebook survey, 62% of respondents said that they were more interested in a brand after seeing it in stories. I don't even watch stories, but apparently that's a thing. So for those of us, as I mentioned, that may have kids or teenagers in the house, I think these are probably underrepresented. And it'll be really interesting to reflect back on and see if the predictions hold true or if they outpace and exactly how things evolve here. But no doubt it's moving fast. And probably a good indicator of how fast we expected to move is mobile. And I kind of date myself when I was thinking back to when did mobile really take off? Like I remember, I don't know, in 2005, I don't really think it was a thing. 2012, I went and did some research. 11% of US e-commerce was happening on mobile in 2012. And then by 2016 here, we see now these are global numbers, that those numbers started to rise significantly. And we sort of hit this critical mass at which point it went from being something we were afraid to do, we rarely did. The interfaces weren't great. You had to enter all of this data. You weren't really sure if it was secure to now. It's the de facto way. And in many, many cases, the mobile experiences actually are far better than the desktop experiences. And I don't know when that happened exactly, but it used to be that the desktop experience was the better experience and you sort of had your mobile experience. And now it's almost completely switched. So really interesting to sort of look back on that growth of mobile. And I think that when we look forward as to what that would be an indicator of the things to come, I don't know what they might be, but we have crypto, we have NFTs, wherever Web 3 takes us. There's wearables, personal assistance, voice initiated commerce, virtual reality. I'd be very curious to see five years from now standing up here, what those trends are, where we start to see nuggets of slow adoption and where that adoption starts to really accelerate and when it hits critical mass and just sort of becomes a new norm. So moving into what shoppers need, and I'm gonna talk about relevancy and efficiency and again, knowing that that's not language that consumers probably use. But I think it's sort of the root of and underpins some of the trends that we're seeing why they're so popular. So check out, expect it to be relevant and efficient. And we know that cart abandonment has many drivers, but at the heart of those, it's the experience relevant to me as a buyer. My device, my location, my currency, the forms of payment I wanna use, is it relevant to the item that I'm buying? Is it a high-priced item? Is it a low-priced item? Is it a service? Is it a physical good? Has that experience really been adopted the whole way through? And when we think about that even a little bit further, thinking about digital or service experiences, many people here have registered a car at the DMV. And you get asked to add your registration to the cart and then to like, are you sure you wanna check out? Yes, I wanna check out and then you go through and you pay, but it's a very physical item experience that's been sort of shoehorned into registering my car, which should just be petty. So when I think about relevancy, I think about relevancy from all of those perspectives and how those can help actually create better experiences that again, a user wouldn't think about as being efficient or inefficient, but certainly play a role. In this data here, we see from Baymard Institute and I'm sure there's lots of studies on lots of numbers on cart abandonment, but some of the themes will be the same. In this one, it was 24% of the users stated that the site wanted them to create an account, which I think we would all argue could be inefficient. 18% said that the checkout process was too long or too complicated, again, inefficient. 7%, there weren't enough payment methods for them, or at least probably the ones they wanted. It wasn't relevant to them. So I think these are some of the underpinnings for what relevancy and efficiency means. There's other drivers, of course, transparency is the shipping and the tax and everything presented up front to me, but moving further into this notion of relevancy and efficiency, I've started to think about what is it that makes a very efficient checkout efficient? And for me, I weren't interested in a brand after seeing it in stories. I don't even watch stories, but apparently that's a thing. So for those of us, as I mentioned, that may have kids or teenagers in the house, I think these are probably underrepresented and it'll be really interesting to reflect back on and see if the predictions hold true or if they outpace and exactly how things evolve here, but no doubt it's moving fast. And probably a good indicator of how fast we expected to move is mobile. And I kind of date myself when I was thinking back to when did mobile really take off? Like I remember, I don't know, in 2005, I don't really think it was a thing. 2012, I went and did some research, 11% of U.S. e-commerce was happening on mobile in 2012. And then by 2016 here, we see now these are global numbers, that those numbers started to rise significantly. And we sort of hit this critical mass, at which point it went from being something we were afraid to do, we rarely did, the interfaces weren't great, you had to enter all of this data. You weren't really sure if it was secure to now, it's the de facto way and in many, many cases, the mobile experiences actually are far better than the desktop experiences. And I don't know when that happened exactly, but it used to be that the desktop experience was the better experience and you sort of had your mobile experience. And now it's almost completely switched. So really interesting to sort of look back on that growth of mobile. And I think that when we look forward as to what that would be an indicator of the things to come, I don't know what they might be, but we have crypto, we have NFTs, wherever Web 3 takes us. There's wearables, personal assistance, voice initiated commerce, virtual reality. Be very curious to see five years from now, standing up here, what those trends are, where we start to see nuggets of slow adoption and where that adoption starts to really accelerate and when it hits critical mass and just sort of becomes a new norm. So moving into what shoppers need and I'm gonna talk about relevancy and efficiency and again, knowing that that's not language that consumers probably use, but I think it's sort of the root of and underpins some of the trends that we're seeing why they're so popular. So check out, expected to be relevant and efficient. And we know that cart abandonment has many drivers, but at the heart of those is the experience relevant to me as a buyer, my device, my location, my currency, the forms of payment I wanna use. Is it relevant to the item that I'm buying? Is it a high priced item? Is it a low priced item? Is it a service? Is it a physical good? Has that experience really been adopted the whole way through? And when we think about that even a little bit further, thinking about digital or service experiences, many people here have registered a car at the DMV and you get asked to add your registration to the cart and then to like, are you sure you wanna check out? Yes, I wanna check out and then you go through and you pay, but it's a very physical item experience that's been sort of shoehorned into registering my car, which should just be petty. So when I think about relevancy, I think about relevancy from all of those perspectives and how those can help actually create better experiences that again, a user wouldn't think about as being efficient or inefficient, but certainly play a role. In this data here we see from Baymard Institute and I'm sure there's lots of studies on, lots of numbers on cart abandonment, but some of the themes will be the same. In this one, it was 24% of the users stated they, the site wanted them to create an account, which I think we would all argue might be inefficient. 18% said that the checkout process was too long or too complicated, again, inefficient. 7%, there weren't enough payment methods for them or at least probably the ones they wanted, it wasn't relevant to them. So I think these are some of the underpinnings for what relevancy and efficiency means. There's other drivers, of course, transparency is the shipping and the tax and everything presented up front to me, but moving further into this notion of relevancy and efficiency, I've started to think about what is it that makes a very efficient checkout efficient? And for me it sort of centers on these three things and authentication, acceleration and adaptation. So authentication, and this was really a key one, we think about, again, that history of mobile. We think about PayPal during that period of time. Many of us remember that they solved a very unique problem at that point in time, which was now I could just log in. All my information would be prefilled. I didn't have to shame their payment information and I could keep going and that sort of converged really nicely as mobile was coming up. When we add authentication to that, now that necessity to log in is potentially removed through the two factor authentication, the device, SMS, again, mobile sort of enabling this coupling together of the notion of authentication, identity with the wallet and your payment credentials. And I think it's the sort of marriage of those two things that's actually really helped to fuel the acceleration of checkout. So then moving into adaptation, again, is the checkout completely adapted for not only the user and their location, but also the type of item that they're buying. And then I think that obviously leads to what we're seeing, which is this growing preference for mobile and digital wallets. And we've seen it happen and be reinforced at the physical point of sale, permeating online, again, creating that flywheel effect, but online now, this merging of identity, of wallet, prefilling all of my data, making me feel secure. The usage is going up quite exponentially. And I think, again, here, probably underestimated, would be interesting to see, but going from 29% in 2021 to anticipated to be 33% in 2025, that seems like a fairly small amount of growth for what I think many of us are becoming much deeply embedded habits. True story, I left my wallet at home for this trip. It was a little bit of a problem with checking into the hotel. I did not have a physical ID, but I had my phone and I had a picture and luckily they took pity on me and let me check in with a picture of my passport. And I don't have a card, but I have an Apple Pay loaded and a card in there. And so if I had to, I could probably buy gas. I was able to order room service. So I'm eight hours from home, no wallet, and didn't even occur to me until about eight hours into my trip that I didn't have a wallet with me. So behaviors are changing fast and they're changing probably faster than any of us will anticipate. Again, here COVID obviously played a role. And one of the things that we're seeing in some of the research is 69% of the retailers said that they saw an increase in contact with those payments during the pandemic. Not surprising, but 94% of those retailers expect that to continue over the next 18 months. So again, laying muscle memory, these behaviors are forever changed and that in-store proximity for mobile payments grew 29%. Think about how hard it is to change behaviors. And we see this adoption, yes, they're convenient. But underlying that, it's so hard to change behaviors. And I thought about when's the last time we saw like the behavior shift in payments. How many people here, EMV, do you know what that is? The chip on the card. You remember going to the terminals and seeing the little cardboard on there of like not ready yet. They started trying to drive chip pinned in the US. It's just chip in Europe, it's chip and pin. We couldn't 100% get it right, but started that project in 2015 to try to drive adoption. Now you have to drive adoption through the card issuers, the hardware suppliers, the merchant account providers, the processors in between. Everybody's got to support it. They started that it was going to be a mandate that kept rolling it back, rolling it back. It was taking too long. Went and did some research in 2016. It was estimated that it was going to take another 18 months to three years to get full scale adoption. It was finally mandated in 2021, and now broadly everyone has it. This is a thing that we all knew was bad. The MagStrop strike data was insecure. It was creating fraud. Cards were being compromised. And yet as a country, it took us seven years to implement chips on cards.  You go to any retailer now. There are point of see sort of centers on these three things. And authentication, acceleration, and adaptation. So authentication, and this was really a key one. If we think about, again, that history of mobile, we think about PayPal during that period of time. Many of us remember that they solved a very unique problem at that point in time, which was now I could just log in. All my information would be prefilled. I didn't have to shame their payment information and I could keep going. And that sort of converged really nicely as mobile was coming up. When we add authentication to that, now that necessity to log in is potentially removed through two factor authentication, the device, SMS. Again, mobile sort of enabling this coupling together of the notion of authentication, identity with the wallet and your payment credentials. And I think it's the sort of marriage of those two things that's actually really helped to fuel the acceleration of checkout. So then moving into adaptation, again, is the checkout completely adapted for not only the user and their location, but also the type of item that they're buying. And then I think that obviously leads to what we're seeing, which is this growing preference for mobile and digital wallets. And we've seen it happen and be reinforced at the physical point of sale, permeating online, again, creating that flywheel effect, but online now this merging of identity, of wallet, pre-filling all of my data, making me feel secure. The usage is going up quite exponentially. And I think, again, here probably underestimated. It'd be interesting to see, but going from 29% in 2021 to anticipated to be 33% in 2025, that seems like a fairly small amount of growth for what I think many of us are becoming much deeply embedded habits. True story, I left my wallet at home for this trip. It was a little bit of a problem with checking into the hotel, I did not have a physical ID. But I had my phone and I had a picture and luckily they took pity on me and let me check in with a picture of my passport. And I don't have a card, but I have an Apple Pay loaded and a card in there. And so if I had to, I could probably buy gas. I was able to order room service. So I'm eight hours from home, no wallet, and didn't even occur to me until about eight hours into my trip that I didn't have a wallet with me. So behaviors are changing fast and they're changing probably faster than any of us will anticipate. Again, here COVID obviously played a role. And one of the things that we're seeing in some of the research is 69% of the retailers said that they saw an increase in contact with payments during the pandemic, not surprising. But 94% of those retailers expect that to continue over the next 18 months. So again, laying muscle memory, these behaviors are forever changed and that in store proximity for mobile payments grew 29%. Think about how hard it is to change behaviors. And we see this adoption, yes, they're convenient. Underlying that, it's so hard to change behaviors. And I thought about once the last time we saw the behavior shift in payments. How many people here are EMV? Do you know what that is? The chip on the card? You remember going to the terminals and seeing the little cardboard on there of not ready yet? They started trying to drive chip pinned in the US. It's just chip in Europe. It's chip and pin. We couldn't 100% get it right. But it started that project in 2015 to try to drive adoption. Now you have to drive adoption through the card issuers, the hardware suppliers, the merchant account providers, the processors in between. So everybody's got to support it. They started that. It was going to be a mandate. They kept rolling it back, rolling it back. It was taking too long. Went and did some research in 2016. It was estimated that it was going to take another 18 months to three years to get full scale adoption. It was finally mandated in 2021. And now broadly everyone has it. This is a thing that we all knew was bad. The megstrap strike data was insecure. It was creating fraud. Cards were being compromised. And yet as a country, it took us seven years to implement chips on cards. And I look back over the last three years of how quickly behaviors changed. You go to any retailer now. Their point of sale system is enabled for contactless. Merchants did a massive upgrade on all of their hardware. The hardware is all now smart. So that lays this foundation for being able to now use digital forms of payment at a physical device, again, creating that flywheel effect, but at an unprecedented pace. And I'm kind of a payment geek. So I like to look back at when's the last time we saw something like this happen? We haven't. So moving into what shoppers need, flexibility and convenience. And I talked about convenience quite a bit in terms of efficiency. But I think our expectations on flexibility are changing as well. So we saw supply chains constrain with COVID long before COVID. They've been going global. Increasingly, the barriers to cross border have actually been reduced. And again, I'll take this from a payments perspective. It used to be when I started in payments in 2000, what it required to sell online was you had to go to your bank. You had to get a merchant account. Took maybe a couple of weeks. Only some banks offered online merchant accounts because not everybody wanted to touch the risk.  So if you're in the US, you're processing in the US and US dollars. We fast forward to now. And by the way, it was incredibly difficult to do anything internationally. And now cross border commerce is enabled quite readily. You can accept payments in currencies all over the world, local forms of payment. We have technologies that are doing things like making currency conversion on the site, localized payment options, all quite accessible. This does a couple of things that I think give flexibility. One, again, supply chain, it's global, but our buyers are changing as well. So you've got as a merchant, the ability to sort of offset and diversify the risk of where do I have inventory and where are there buyers that need that inventory and who's willing to sort of pay the best price. And at the same time, now buyers have the ability to sort of say, I don't care if it's located in another country, it's available, it's at the price that I want and I'm gonna buy it. You add all of those together and cross border just becomes a huge opportunity that I don't think as many people are tapped into as they should be. I did a little survey before I came here. I asked my son and his girlfriend, 18 and 23 year olds, have you bought anything from a seller that's not in the US? Yes, they both had Australia, England, Canada. And did you have any trepidation about buying online? I said, well, I wanna know that the return policy is maybe the same. Okay, and was it presented in US dollars or was it presented in Australian dollars? And I got a mix of answers. And I said, what did you do when it was in Australian dollars? I looked it up on Google. So the buyer behaviors for what used to be really uncomfortable shopping from anything other than your own home currency and emergent in the US are changing and they're changing rapidly to I like the item, it's available, I don't care what currency it is and I don't care that it's shipping internationally. Assuming that those things can all be done sort of frictionlessly and it can get here in a reasonable period of time. So long story short, I think cross-border is a huge opportunity to drive increased growth from merchants and also to de-risk sort of that concentration of where is your buyer base and how you can adapt as inventory changes as well. And then buy now, pay later. And this one is an adoption, one that we're seeing really, really gain traction quickly. And it's connected to cross-border because it actually started to gain popularity in countries where card use is not dominant. The buy now, pay later options that we see and notably, Klarna really began in Germany where the predominant way to pay is with a bank. These are not credit dominant, credit card dominant markets. And so now what we see with the rise of buy now, pay later is a couple of things. Flexibility for buyers gives them a lot more optionality in how they shop. It opens up new segments. So customers who historically either didn't have a credit card, wouldn't use a credit card or in a country where credit cards are not sort of the norm. Buy now, pay later is quite literally exploding. The sale system is enabled for contactless. Merchants did a massive upgrade on all of their hardware. The hardware is all now smart. So that lays this foundation for being able to now use digital forms of payment at a physical device. Again, creating that flywheel effect, but at an unprecedented pace. And I'm kind of a payment geek. So I like to look back at when's the last time we saw something like this happen? We haven't. So moving into what shoppers need, flexibility and convenience. And I talked about convenience quite a bit in terms of efficiency, but I think our expectations on flexibility are changing as well. So we saw supply chains constrain with COVID long before COVID. They've been going global. Increasingly the barriers to cross border have actually been reduced. And again, I'll take this from a payments perspective. It used to be when I started in payments in 2000, what it required to sell online was you had to go to your bank. You had to get a merchant account. Took maybe a couple of weeks. Only some banks offered online merchant accounts because not everybody wanted to touch the risk.  So if you're in the US, you're processing in the US in US dollars. We fast forward to now. And by the way, it was incredibly difficult to do anything internationally. And now cross border commerce is enabled quite readily. You can accept payments in currencies all over the world, local forms of payment. We have technologies that are doing things like making currency conversion on the site, localized payment options, all quite accessible. This does a couple of things that I think give flexibility. One, again, supply chain, it's global, but our buyers are changing as well. So you've got, as a merchant, the ability to sort of offset and diversify the risk of, where do I have inventory and where are there buyers that need that inventory and who's willing to sort of pay the best price. And at the same time, now buyers have the ability to sort of say, I don't care if it's located in another country, it's available, it's at the price that I want and I'm gonna buy it.  I did a little survey before I came here. I asked my son and his girlfriend, 18 and 23 year olds, have you bought anything from a seller that's not in the US? Yes, they both had Australia, England, Canada. And did you have any trepidation about buying online? And I said, well, like, I wanna know that the return policy is maybe the same. Okay, was it presented in US dollars or was it presented in Australian dollars? And I got a mix of answers. And I said, what did you do when it was in Australian dollars? I looked it up on Google. So the buyer behaviors for what used to be really uncomfortable shopping from anything other than your own home currency in a merchant in the US are changing rapidly to I like the item, it's available, I don't care what currency it is and I don't care that it's shipping internationally. Assuming that those things can all be done sort of frictionlessly and it can get here in a reasonable period of time. So long story short, I think cross border is a huge opportunity to drive increased growth from merchants and also to de-risk sort of that concentration of where is your buyer base and how you can adapt as inventory changes as well. And then buy now pay later. And this one is an adoption, one that we're seeing really, really gain traction quickly. And it's connected to cross border because it actually started to gain popularity in countries where card use is not dominant. The buy now pay later options that we see and notably Klarna really began in Germany where the predominant way to pay is with a bank. These are not credit dominant, credit card dominant markets. And so now what we see with the rise of buy now pay later is a couple of things. Flexibility for buyers, it gives them a lot more optionality in how they shop. It opens up new segments. So customers who historically either didn't have a credit card, wouldn't use a credit card or in a country where credit cards are not sort of the norm. Buy now pay later is quite literally exploding. There's definitely some negative press out there about is it being used in ways that people can't afford. Very similar to what we saw with credit cards in the early years or people getting themselves into financial trouble. And there's a whole new generation of folks that younger folks even in the US that do not use credit cards, don't wanna use credit and yet are using buy now pay later. It's just an interesting different mental model shift for sort of something quite similar, but yet different. So new commerce models is what I wanted to cover. And the fact that those are actually at the heart of most of those is enabled by payments. Mobile wallet usage, expediting the adoption of contactless payments, smart terminals that can take wallets. The linking of authentication, your payment credentials to your identity, making checkout more efficient in ways that I don't think most people probably decompose in those ways. And then alternative payment options, giving shoppers flexibility in how they fund their transactions. And this is kind of an interesting notion. So when I talk about funding a transaction, what I mean is the way that we pay using a wallet is actually not the same way that we might fund a transaction for anyone who's used PayPal. Hopefully that rings true. You can fund your balance via bank, via balance, via card. Someone can send you money on Venmo, right? The way that you fund a transaction could be quite different from the way that you're actually spending those dollars. And so what this builds is a deliberate disconnect between the act of shopping, which people like and the act of paying, which nobody likes. And the further you disassociate those two, the higher you actually drive conversion and repeat usage and the good psychology around shopping with the bad psychology around paying. So alternative payment options, not only give flexibility, but they do create a separation between the act of shopping and the act of paying, which is an important one. And then local payment methods. Again, tapping into cross-border and making sure that buyers around the globe who are increasingly new, new consumer markets, which I didn't talk about, emerging markets coming online, shopping, wanting US goods, and then US shoppers buying, sourcing inventory overseas, making sure that regardless of that use case that people have the most relevant way to pay for them in the currency that's local to them and hopefully with an adapted experience. And then finally pay later options and really expanding buyer purchasing power and flexibility and tapping into markets and segments where credit card usage is maybe not dominant or not even available. So all of these things for me are fundamentally new ways engaging with a customer through checkout, but they're enabled by payments. So how do you win? And for me, I think that's around enabling access across physical, card present, digital, online, social, mobile, optimized wallets and experiences, making sure that however a shopper is coming to you, that they have a consistent and relevant experience and that relevancy is about them and their personalized preferences, their country, their device, their currency, the form of payment that they wanna use. And again, the experience adapted to the actual item that they're buying as well. Is it inexpensive? Is it a service? Is it a physical good? And then efficiency, how fast and frictionless can that checkout process be? And how many steps can we remove? Can we remove additional steps by tethering together identity and authentication with a wallet and financial credentials and the notion of pre-filling financial information and clubbing even further? What are your preferences? My preference in the wallet. I have forms of payment that are default. I have currency preferences, shipping preferences. All of these help make the checkout process much more efficient. And then finally, flexibility. Are you offering me all of the choices that I want? Do I have things like buy now, pay later? Other installment options. And those are most relevant obviously in a retail e-com scenario in a B2B use case that might be something like invoicing. It might be something like net 30. But is that flexibility there and adopted locally for them? So payment providers and the ones that you choose really do play a big role in across all of these and which access relevancy efficient. There's definitely some negative press out there about is it being used in ways that people can't afford. Very similar to what we saw with credit cards in the early years or people getting themselves into financial trouble. And there's a whole new generation of folks that younger folks even in the US that do not use credit cards, don't want to use credit and yet are using buy now, pay later. It's just an interesting different mental model shift for sort of something quite similar, but yet different. So new commerce models is what I wanted to cover and the fact that those are actually at the heart of most of those is enabled by payments. Mobile wallet usage, expediting the adoption of contactless payments, smart terminals that can take wallets, the linking of authentication, your payment credentials to your identity, making checkout more efficient in ways that I don't think most people probably decompose in those ways. And then alternative payment options, giving shoppers flexibility in how they fund their transactions. And this is kind of an interesting notion. So when I talk about funding a transaction, what I mean is the way that we pay using a wallet is actually not the same way that we might fund a transaction and for anyone who's used PayPal, hopefully that rings true. You can fund your balance via bank, via balance, via card. Someone can send you money on Venmo, right? The way that you fund a transaction could be quite different from the way that you're actually spending those dollars. And so what this builds is a deliberate disconnect between the act of shopping, which people like, and the act of paying, which nobody likes. And the further you disassociate those two, the higher you actually drive conversion and repeat usage and the good psychology around shopping with the bad psychology around paying. So alternative payment options, not only give flexibility, but they do create a separation between the act of shopping and the act of paying, which is an important one. And then local payment methods, again, tapping into cross-border and making sure that buyers around the globe who are increasingly new consumer markets, which I didn't talk about, emerging markets coming online, shopping, wanting US goods, and then US shoppers buying, sourcing inventory overseas, making sure that regardless of that use case that people have the most relevant way to pay for them in the currency that's local to them, and hopefully with an adapted experience. And then finally, pay later options and really expanding buyer purchasing power and flexibility and tapping into markets and segments where credit card usage is maybe not dominant or not even available. So all of these things, for me, are fundamentally new ways of engaging with a customer through checkout, but they're enabled by payments. So how do you win? For me, I think that's around enabling access across physical, card present, digital, online, social, mobile, optimized wallets and experiences, making sure that however a shopper is coming to you, that they have a consistent and relevant experience, and that relevancy is about them and their personalized preferences, their country, their device, their currency, the form of payment that they wanna use. And again, the experience adapted to the actual item that they're buying as well. Is it inexpensive? Is it a service? Is it a physical good? And then efficiency, how fast and frictionless can that checkout process be? How many steps can we remove? Can we remove additional steps by tethering together identity and authentication with a wallet and financial credentials and the notion of pre-filling financial information and clubbing even further, what are your preferences? My preference in the wallet, I have forms of payment that are default. I have currency preferences, shipping preferences. All of these help make the checkout process much more efficient. And then finally, flexibility. Are you offering all of the choices that I want? Do I have things like buy now, pay later? Other installment options. And those are most relevant, obviously, in a retail e-com scenario, in a B2B use case, that might be something like invoicing. It might be something like net 30. But is that flexibility there and adopted locally for them? So, payment providers and the ones that you choose really do play a big role across all of these and which access, relevancy, efficiency, flexibility. You choose the wrong provider and those things may not be available to you when you need. You would choose the right provider. And those things, I think, will be more addressable and allow people to adapt so that when we have major changes and we need to be able to react really, really quickly, as we all just saw in the last three years, changes to business model, that you have flexible systems that permeate all the way into your payment provider and your e-commerce system to help you be able to grow, respond, and react and participate as the changing commerce landscape continues to evolve quite rapidly. So, with that, I think that I'm wrapped up. Of course, we have time for questions or comments so if anybody would like. Hi, great to talk. Hi. I was wondering, do you see in the future for Woo, the buy now pay later model being an offering? And I just wanted to kind of get your perspective on how do you see payments playing a role in the metaverse and the rise of that? Yeah. So, specific to Woo, buy now pay later is an option. We support a variety of choices via extension and so there's, you know, Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, I'm probably forgetting a few, but those are choices that are available today and we're actually seeing increased adoption of those and like I said, on the buyer side, we're seeing quite a bit of increased traction there and all of the research that I've done are that they absolutely drive incremental spend, higher order basket size, repeat usage. So, and then in the metaverse, I'm going to just say that's so far out of my realm, but I do think this notion of linking of payment to identity and that in the metaverse, you're perpetually in sort of a logged in state and where you have your identity known, even if it's anonymized, but you have payment and other data appended to that now, you're able to sort of transact seamlessly in a way that feels probably a lot less different, a lot more different than sort of the legacy E-Com state of I'm going to log in, I'm going to specifically pay. I think, again, where we start to see emerging of financial information with identity information, we can remove steps from the process and we're seeing some of that with token gated wallets and some of the Web3 wallets where you get access to a whole new experience, but you're in a authenticated state already. Hi, as a fellow data nerd, I'm really excited about this talk. You've done a beautiful job at lining out, making a case of what we need to be considering while we are configuring these transaction experiences. Do you have any insight on the actual user testing and how organizations can work with their customers to ensure that they are getting that information back from them and getting those feedback loops to make those right choices? Specific to payments or just in general? Specific to setting up the carts and the payment environment. AB testing can be quite difficult, especially in a live environment for payments. One of the ways that I've done it in the past is to throttle volume. So we would take every fifth user would see a different checkout experience, that type of thing. One would have forms of payment available. Sometimes same forms of payment, but maybe they're presented in a different way. They're sequenced in a different way. Those things actually drive more behavior shift than one might imagine. Just the ordering of things on the page and what's sort of available first, and then add additional forms of payment and test adoption. Yeah. What is Woo doing to make the checkout experience more relevant and less frictional these days? Less frictional. Well, I think one of the things we're doing would be to see flexibility. You choose the wrong provider and those things may not be available to you when you need. You would choose the right provider and those things I think will be more addressable and allow people to adapt, so that when we have major changes and we need to be able to react really, really quickly, as we all just saw in the last three years, changes to business model, that you have flexible systems that permeate all the way into your payment provider and your e-commerce system to help you be able to grow, respond, and react and participate as the changing commerce landscape continues to evolve quite rapidly. With that, I think that I'm wrapped up. Of course, we have time for questions or comments if anybody would like. Hi, great to talk. I was wondering, do you see in the future for Woo the buy-now-pay-later model being an offering? And I just wanted to kind of get your perspective on how do you see payments playing a role in the metaverse and the rise of that. Yeah. So specific to Woo, buy-now-pay-later is an option. We support a variety of choices via extension, and so there's, you know, Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay, I'm probably forgetting a few, but those are choices that are available today, and we're actually seeing increased adoption of those. And like I said, on the buyer side, we're seeing quite a bit of increased traction there, and all of the research that I've done are that they absolutely drive incremental spend, higher order basket size, repeat usage. So, and then in the metaverse, I'm going to just say that's so far out of my realm, but I do think this notion of linking of payment to identity and that in the metaverse, you're perpetually in sort of a logged in state and where you have your identity known, even if it's anonymized, but you have payment and other data appended to that. Now, you're able to sort of transact seamlessly in a way that feels probably a lot less different, a lot more different than sort of the legacy E-coms data that I'm going to log in, I'm going to specifically pay. I think, again, where we start to see emerging of financial information with identity information, we can remove steps from the process, and we're seeing some of that with token gated wallets and some of the Web3 wallets where you get access to a whole new experience, but you're in a authenticated state already. Hi. As a fellow data nerd, I'm really excited about this talk. You've done a beautiful job at lining out, making a case of what we need to be considering while we are configuring these transaction experiences. Do you have any insight on the actual user testing and how organizations can work with their customers to ensure that they are getting that information back from them and getting those feedback loops to make those right choices? Specific to payments or just in general? Specific to setting up the carts and the payment environment. Yeah. AB testing is obviously, it can be quite difficult, especially in a live environment for payments. One of the ways that I've done it in the past is to throttle volume. So we would take every fifth user would see a different checkout experience, that type of thing. One would have forms of payment available. Sometimes same forms of payment, but maybe they're presented in a different way. They're sequenced in a different way. Those things actually drive more behavior shift than one might imagine. Just the ordering of things on the page and what's sort of available first, and then add additional forms of payment and test adoption. Yeah. What is Woo doing to make the checkout experience more relevant and less frictional these days? Less frictional. Well, I think one of the things we're doing would be around checkout blocks and making sure that we are really doing what just happened there. Really simplified and the best experiences. At the end of the day, the more we know about a user and what country they're coming from and the type of item that they're buying, the more that we will be able to present more tailored experiences. So I think there's a balance there in how much we know about a customer. But that's the path that we are going down, which is how can we enable either you to tell us more about that transaction so that we can adapt the experience. Hi. I wanted to know about the incidence of fraud and whether fraud is a user's digital wallet, is the less fraud perpetuated than maybe through credit cards or by now paid later? I know that was mentioned as well because the burden is often on the retailer to do that, right? It's a really interesting question actually because the user is authenticated into the wallet. Generally what you see is that the wallet, and it depends on the wallet, so I should unpack that a little bit, but in the case of like a PayPal, the wallet provider is actually responsible for the buyer side fraud there. Now there's a couple ways that a transaction goes bad, but if it was a case of stolen account takeover or stolen identity rate, like I didn't make this transaction, then in that instance the wallet provider would be the one responsible for that transaction. So they do and can add an additional sort of protection because the merchant has been sort of removed from the authentication process, if you will. I'm trying to think through on an Apple Pay transaction which really works quite different because it's just a tokenization of a credit card versus a full sort of logged in and wallet, but again there you would have had sort of did the user biometrically authenticated and so there is a lower instance of fraud there not to say that it can't happen. On this topic of fraud also, do you have any suggestions or solutions for repeated fraudulent transactions where people are trying to guess credit cards? We have this trouble a lot with the merchant accounts. Fraud's a big topic. I think your question is specific to carding which is the testing of credit cards and often those are sort of scripted attacks so you'll want to do things to try to mitigate velocity and having a lot of detections and rules sort of upfront of hopefully even being able to get to the point where a credit card transaction would be coming through. So there's how you checkpoint a user through the site so that you understand who they are and their identity or device fingerprinting has been used along the way. So I think there's how much mitigation can you do in advance of ever getting to the checkout and then once you get to checkout hopefully there's some rules in place that are trying to mitigate how rapid a particular user is velocity based on the number of times that I've seen this user, this device to the extent that you can tell this IP, etc. A lot of times they'll be bouncing IPs but to the extent that you can tell that it's the same user maybe it's the same card number maybe it's the same email address there's something about it that has a profile that tells you this might be the same user repeatedly and then building in blocks so that when you see those patterns you're mitigating them down to a very narrow band. What do you think is going to happen to the brands and the payment providers that maybe are built on older technology and aren't up to speed nowadays with digital wallets or better APIs for integrations? How are they going to fit into the market for the future? Do you see them failing or do you think they'll adapt? Around checkout blocks and making sure that we are really... I don't know what just happened there. Really simplified and the best experiences. At the end of the day the more we know about a user and what country they're coming from and the type of item that they're buying the more that we will be able to present more tailored experiences. So there's a balance there in how much we know about a customer but that's the path that we are going down which is how can we enable either you to tell us more about that transaction and adapt the experience. Hi. I wanted to know about the incidence of fraud and whether fraud would use a digital wallet is the less fraud perpetuated than maybe through credit cards or by now paid later? I know that was mentioned as well because the burden is often on the retailer to do that, right? It's a really interesting question actually because the user is authenticated into the wallet generally what you see is that the wallet and it depends on the wallet so I should unpack that a little bit but in the case of like a PayPal the wallet provider is actually is actually responsible for the buyer side fraud there now there's a couple ways that a transaction goes bad but if it was a case of stolen account takeover or stolen identity rate to make this transaction then in that instance the wallet provider would be the one responsible for that transaction so they do and can add an additional sort of protection because the merchant has been sort of removed from the authentication process if you will I'm trying to think through on an Apple Pay transaction which really works quite different because it's just a tokenization of a credit card which is a full sort of logged in wallet but again there you would have had sort of did the user biometrically authenticated and so there is a lower instance of fraud there not to say that it can't happen On this topic of fraud also do you have any suggestions or solutions for repeated fraudulent transactions where people are trying to guess credit cards we have this trouble a lot with merchant accounts Fraud is a big topic I think your question is specific to carding which is the testing of credit cards and often those are sort of scripted attacks so you'll want to do things to try to mitigate velocity and having a lot of detections and rules sort of upfront of hopefully even being able to get to the point where a credit card transaction would be coming through so there's how you checkpoint a user through the site so that you understand who they are and their identity or device fingerprinting that's been used along the way so I think there's how much mitigation can you do in advance of ever getting to the checkout and then once you get to checkout hopefully there's some rules in place that are trying to mitigate how rapid a particular user is it velocity based on the number of times that I've seen this user this device to the extent that you can tell this IP etc a lot of times they'll be bouncing IPs but to the extent that you can tell that it's the same user maybe it's the same card number or the same email address there's something about it that has a profile that tells you this might be the same user repeatedly and then building in blocks so that when you see those patterns you're mitigating them down to a very narrow band what do you think is going to happen to the brands and the payment providers that maybe are built on older technology and aren't up to speed nowadays with digital wallets or better APIs for integrations going to fit into the market for the future do you see them failing or do you think they'll adapt the brands being like card brands like Visa Mastercard the PSP so an example in the UK Opaio which is formerly SagePaid some of their gateways are older technology how do you think the market is going to shift with those older technology those brands compared to the more modern integrations these days I think there's I don't know that I 100% understand the question but I think it's standalone payment brands and PSPs versus more embedded solutions and it's going to it comes down a little bit to flexibility and having a standalone payment relationship can make a lot of sense if you're using many disparate systems or channels and you need that payment system to be able to cut across those if most of your business can be conducted within a single system then having a fully embedded payment system that can make reconciliation and have full integration into all aspects of that system is actually more efficient so it's really around I think for an individual merchant how they run their business and the extent to which my source of truth or my system of record can be all in one place versus the extent to which it's disparate and when it's disparate that having a standalone payment service provider can make a lot of sense Thanks Hi, great talk so you had also talked about like linking your identity and authenticating like some type of payment so I see this like with like shop pay or some other like one click checkout solutions what's your take on like some successful ones like shop pay and there's been some like failed ones like fast failed do you feel like people aren't ready quite yet for like one click checkout or where do you think that will go I think we're seeing evidence that people are ready and they're using it we have the ones that we've seen that are not I guess you said failed some of the ones that didn't see success I think it's really around their channel strategy and their integration strategy there was also quite a bit in the monetization model so at the end of the day it's sort of who's providing the service are they providing it at an extra fee or not and is that extra fee then worth it to a merchant or a platform to integrate it to the extent that it's included and it's free I think we'll see greater adoption where we see adoption from a merchant perspective than the question is will consumers use it and I think we are seeing that consumers will use it and in fact really like the ability to not have to create an account to have things sort of remembered for them again that linkage of identity to payment credential so I think in the ones that have not been successful that it isn't because of the technology or the use case and it's more a function of broader distribution economics and integration strategy awesome thank you that's pretty much it we all have time for so thank you Kayla and everyone break for lunch


The Pope's Exorcist was a movie that was released in 2023, believe it or not. Yeah, the year you're probably watching this video. It was in theaters for two hours and now it's on streaming platforms. I watched it on Netflix. Movie's an hour 43, which is a beautiful runtime for me. It's a nice horror flick. It's a thriller. It's got some humor in it. And it's got Russell Crowe, honestly, being better than he has been in quite some time. Got a small cast of characters. The movie primarily takes place in one central location, which is a creepy old house. Everyone's favorite. And it's really focused in on one specific family. This kind of reminded me of Evil Dead Rise. And I have to tell you, I actually quite enjoyed it.