On March 25, less than a week after postponing our upcoming CNP Summit, we announced the 2020 CNP Virtual Summit Series.

CNP (Card Not Present) Summit is a market-leading event at the crossroads of security, e-commerce, software, mobile, retail and payments. Our audience ranges from global retailers, to small/medium business e-commerce sites across many vertical markets, as well as technology providers and payment processors.

Originally scheduled to run from May 19-21 in San Francisco, the summit has been postponed for a future date. In the meantime, we have taken it online to the keep the security conversation moving forward. Digital fraud prevention and payment acceptance and security will be especially important in the next few months as social distancing forces people to do much of their shopping online. We want to help the e-commerce and fraud prevention industry stay connected with one another safely while providing the critical information they need during a time of heightened activity and risk.

Three channel summit

Launching on April 8, 2020 and running through to May 20, our CNP Virtual Summit features:

Sponsored Webinars happening each Wednesday at 2pm ET, which give sponsors visibility as subject matter experts and also high quality leads.

Virtual Merchant Meet-Ups held each Tuesday at 2pm ET, where attendees can network and share ideas with each other on specific topics and verticals through hosted video chats.

A Virtual Exhibit Hall, accessible through our CNP Virtual Summit site, where participating solution providers can be listed with a logo, company and solution description, one piece of downloadable content (e.g., white paper) as well as contact information including links.

When first considering a virtual summit, we looked at several scenarios before deciding that a summit series, held over the course of several weeks, would be ideal. We put ourselves in the shoes of those who would be attending virtually and realized that consuming educational content in front of a screen for 8-9 hours a day over the course of multiple days would be a tough ask.

But, having content to choose from each week, where the commitment would be two hours per week maximum, seemed much more realistic.

Speed to market – and future opportunities

We were fortunate to already have a successful ‘365’ online media mechanism in place through our online publication CardNotPresent.com, a hub for news, information and analysis about the fraud prevention and payments issues that most affect online merchants.

On CardNotPresent.com we partner with leading digital payment and fraud solution providers throughout the year on webinars, publishing and hosting whitepapers for download, and through sponsored advertorial content. This put us in a unique position to start thinking about opportunities, for us and our partners, weeks before the May 19-21 CNP Summit would be postponed, by using the platforms that we already use throughout the year and also incorporating some new elements.

We are already discussing the possibility of extending the CNP Virtually Summit Series beyond May 20 and/or running it again later in the year.John Bomier is the Event and Community Director for CNP.