Published to Whisper Club: Sepetember 28, 2026 ID: TBW2237
Analyst(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
Photojournalist(s): Dr. Doreen Galli
ABSTRACT
“This Whisper Report investigates What’s killing dealer margin? Drawing on insights from telecommunications professionals attending All Wireless & Prepaid Expo 2026 in Las Vegas, it examines the competitive and operational pressures reducing profitability for wireless dealers. The discussion highlights pricing pressure, carrier practices, and the need for differentiation in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Cited experts: Omar Khan Supersonic Mobile ISPWN, Adam Wolf NWIDA, Rob Link Tech Care Association, Stuart Chowning Telgoo5.”
Money 20/20 USA 2024 was held at the Venetian and boasted over 10,000 attendees from over 90 countries with 80% of attendees coming from the USA. The over 400 speakers and 300 exhibits were captured by TBW Advisors with over 340 minutes of video captured and posted. As the place where money does business, the event brings together the ecosystem of money spanning banks payments tech startups, and capital market. AI everywhere, cross bank collaboration and cross geography collaboration along with fighting fraud were the key themes throughout.
Highlights
AI everywhere with particular focus on fight fraud along with cross bank and cross-border collaboration was discussed throughout the keynotes and the exhibits.
Cautions
As with all new AI technology use cases, it is critical to verify the quality of the data used in training the models and identify any inherent biases. The desire is to increase accessibility of the fintech market as opposed to further facilitating biases and disenfranchisement.
After more than 340 minutes of taping, 29 videos, a few hundred shorts forthcoming, and over 50 fact checks, our coverage of the Money 20/20 USA 2024 closes. Money 20/20 USA had over 10,000 attendees, 400 speakers, and 300 exhibits full of vendors from around the world*. Nonetheless, there were no lines at registration to pick up one’s badge. An exciting note was shared during the press briefing that 47% of speakers were women in 2024 up from 11% in 2023. The conference provided a full breakfast for all attendees as well as some smaller stations with continental breakfast. If that wasn’t enough food, have no fear a full lunch was also available to all attendees right in the exhibit hall as well. Speakers graced one of 6 stages with a fan favorite being the Sentient stage featuring Money 20/20’s custom sentient robot, Aiana-live.
No matter where in the world one resides, your life is impacted by fintech. Some experience significant inconveniences such as sending digital money to relatives across the globe only for those relatives to receive physical money. Cross border payments maintaining digital banking convenience was one of the examples shared in the distinguished panel on creating a new language for cross-border payments. This panel featured Ryan Zagone from Wise who presented his company’s solution. Other panelists included leaders from TBD – a block company, Bankaya and Vansary. A key to achieving customer desired functionality is continual modernization of payment platforms beyond migrating to the cloud. This panel included leaders from Wise, Bank of America, Deloitte, and Amazon. A session on Navigating the journey to the cloud featured leaders from Featurespace, AWS and T-Sys. The focus of this session was the need for collaboration amongst partners for the benefit of the customers. One part of the ecosystem cannot go to the cloud if critical components they depend on remain on premise. The migration journey is never truly completed. To ensure your product has solid APIs to easily integrate with the rest of the market, APImatic shared their product on the expo floor. APIMatic increases adoption by leveraging automation to ensure you complete the journey to usable APIs.
One key ingredient every business requires is customers! The panel, “Small is the next big thing” emphasized the sheer magnitude of opportunity by serving small businesses which make up 44% of the US GDP. This panel featured leaders from Co-created, Penelope, and SMB Franchise Advisors. The emphasis was to encourage the creation of a one-stop shop, a single pane solution for all one’s financial needs for the SMB space. One method to extend the reach to additional customers includes embedded payments and private capital to expand the consumer credit space. A panel on this topic featured leaders from Jeffries, Milken Institute, Citi and Pagaya. The session emphasized the need for new risk rating models for those not currently served by the sector. In this regard, an AI risk decision engine for financial services by Bordo.ai was displayed in the expo hall.
Once you have your customers, you want them to have an amazing experience. To facilitate a unified view of all customer activities on your platform, Mixpanel was one of the vendors on hand demonstrating their capabilities. This product along with the talk on hyper-personalization in the age of AI reminded us of our coverage of the Adobe Summit. If this is a passion area be sure to review this research as well as enjoy its related playlist.
Expanding on the hyper-personalization to serve customers, a fireside chat featured Fortune reporter Luisa Beltran interviewing PayPal’s Frank Keller. Titled, AI + Trust, the question of when too personalization becomes a creepy user experience was discussed. The one where you have a conversation on the phone then suddenly your computer has an advertisement for such a product. Part of the challenge with the trust question arises because the bad guys are organized, collaborate, and share information but the good guys do not. As discussed in the session “Fighting Fraud in an AI First World’, until the good teams collaborate, the issue will remain. This exciting panel featured leaders from Google, Mostly AI, BNY and Swift. This point was also emphasized in How AI Innovation Influences Trust and Safety panel. This panel featured leaders from JP Morgan, Walmart, Trulioo, and OpenAI. A key takeaway included that AI plus humans is creating new capabilities to try to counterbalance the aggressive progressive of the fraudsters leveraging AI in a coordinated fashion.
Trust is a two-way street. For financial institutions attempting to establish trust with their customers, they may wish to leverage Inscribe.AI. This platform reviews all documents turned in by customers for signs of fraud leveraging generative AI. Maintaining compliance can also assist with maintaining trust. A highly automated intelligent solution for achieving compliance that is traceable, explainable, and auditable by Trisotech was on exhibit. As anyone who has played with early consumer editions of generative AI knows, true value of generative AI is not just the answer but understanding the why behind the generated answer. If, however, your organization is interested in leveraging behavioural AI to prevent fraud, Futurespace may be one of the products for your organization to evaluate.
Nothing loses a customer’s trust like compromising their privacy and their data. Sometimes, no matter the steps taken, a company accidently leaves a backdoor open or misconfigures their environment compromising customer trust. Have no fear, Packetlabs and their white hats are here to offer their services. Remember: it is always better to hire white hats to find your security issues instead of finding out on the front page of the news.
Finally, one of the more critical aspects of trust according to SEC Chair, Glen Gensler is the whistleblower program. This was one of the many topics discussed in this fireside chat.
We had a flashback to our coverage at Identiverse, as one might expect at any conference in a highly regulated space. The expo hall had some identity solutions on display. A true global identity solution can be difficult to find but Shufti shared their solution. Available across 240 countries validating over 10,000 document types with outcomes in over 150 languages, Shufti is based out of London.
Another identity problem arises in Fintech around the use of credit cards. Is the person using the card really the person we issued the card to? Prove shared their solution that enables you to prove it is really you with only one small line added to the magnetic strip. Prove interestingly leverages the technology within smartphones today to enable the credit card to be a key. With a tap of your credit card to the phone, the phone can let the company know if it is really the card holder holding the official card making the charge.
While very little of the conference did not involve AI, a key concern within Fintech involves using public models with their highly regulated data. Glean shared their product that consumes all your internal data to create a customer LLM for your organization. If your emphasis is one producing customer facing content from your own data, then Writer that leverages generative AI over your own data may be something to explore.
One of the more creative talks on Generative AI was titled, “Killer GENAI Cake”. Emphasizing the parallels to how baking powder created new use cases for baking, GENAI will expedite fintech and related user experiences to the next level. Featuring leaders from Microsoft, iGenius, Growfin and Citizens. Questions addressed by this panel included what use cases could materialize in 2025 and beyond?
Next year’s Money 20/20 USA will be once again held at the Sands Convention Center on October 26-29, 2025.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
Analyst(s) and Photojournalist: Doreen Galli, PhD MBA
ABSTRACT
After 400 minutes of filming, 30 videos, countless shorts and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Smart Retail Tech Expo 2024 closes. Smart Retail Tech Expo is part of 5 conferences held at once at the same time and place: White Label, Retail, Supply Chain and Logistics Expo, Smart Retail Tech, Ecommerce Packaging and Labelling and Com Business Live. It was held in Las Vegas from May 8 to May 9 at the South Lower Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The event featured 5 theaters with each featuring 4-5 talks each day for a total of 47 keynote sessions. With discussion on distribution and logistics and vendors for every step of the journey, one could launch a new business with the contacts from this event alone.
After 2 days of filming some 400 minutes of content, 30 videos with endless shorts coming and over 30 factchecks, our coverage of this years’ Smart Retail Tech Expo closes. The event is five events held at once all together. White Label, Retail, Supply chain and Logistics Expo, Smart Retail Tech, E-Commerce Packaging and Labelling and Com Business Live. With row after row of exhibits*, the event was made whole by the balanced combination of talks and exhibits. Even better, there was 15 minutes in between the talks so one could catch the exhibits. Furthermore, all theaters schedules were once again aligned in the event you wanted to switch theaters as well.
The short two-day event packs a punch with 5 keynote theatres each featuring 4 or 5 talks a day for a whopping 47 sessions. The first day was supposed to be capped off by a presentation Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy but it was cancelled purportedly due to security concerns. We captured 30 videos that will result in a lot of great shorts so be sure to save the entire playlist of videos for Conference Whispers: Smart Retail Tech Expo. We were able to capture the walkabout of the entire conference right at the conference’s grand opening. If you are wondering what was to eat at the show, we have you covered with video of the food lines and menus.
The keynotes at this smaller event were quite impressive and featured talks from Google, AWS, Home Depot, Lenova, and ASCM (Association of Supply Chain Management) to name a few. Douglas Kent of ASCM (Association of Supply Chain Management) shared top supply chain trends during his keynote. Jesus Sanchez from Google show the many ways in which you can put Google AI to work for you for your retail solution. It is all about optimizing marketing expenses. He also shared the interesting statistic that 15% of all searches are unique. Amazon’s Justin Honaman shared the many ways AWS Gen AI is being leveraged for innovation in retail and CPG. Phil Pench of DHL ecommerce shared an interesting talk with the list of options for the end of the supply chain particularly for those importing goods.
Home Depot’s Paul Ganz shared the ripple effect of failing a customer. He reminded all that you only get one chance to take care of your customer. That once the customer bought the product, you are handling their item – not yours and it should be treated as such. Chewy’s Debarati Das gave a detailed talk highlighting the complexities of inventory management in the context of the corporate goals and customer satisfaction requirements. There were many people waiting to speak with this speaker following the talk. Kevin Lawton of @thenewwarehouse examined the question of doing fulfillment from the retail location versus a warehouse. Admittedly, this talk reminded me of a patent I was awarded as an IBM Engineer on this exact topic in the heart of the dot com era.
While many of the exhibits focused on the White Label portion of the show were captured in the walkabout, there was no technology for us to cover. Nonetheless, we discovered quite a bit of tech to capture. If you need to make a professional video to sell your wares or any other services in getting your product to market, newegg was on display with media, sellingpilot, and marketplace. If you are not sure about the size of the object you are selling, vMeasure was on site. vMeasure leverages cameras, sensors and scales with some great AI /ML models to provide the size of the object.
If one is selling something in a store, are instead display, Retail Media Management was there to share their digital signs and smart retail tags. One only needs to change the price online, and all price tags will automatically update. They are reported to have a 5-year battery life. Admittedly, we know days of batteries in such electronics is limited as glass can now capture energy from thin air as seen in our coverage at CES. Another digital sign company, Hongzhou had a smart menu kiosk on exhibit. This kiosk not only takes the order and payment but coordinates the order to the kitchen staff. Limited staff but want to open a pizza joint? Pzza has an automated solution to make commercial pizzas that only requires one employee to run the shop. This exhibit gave us flashbacks to the automatic stir fry tech we saw at CES, Techmagic. If you would like to bring home the bacon instead of serving it, Bacon Tech was on site with their staffing and employee management mobile application. If your retail business involves CBD, Argyle Payments was on hand to help you with your banking needs.
To secure a retail space, many require video surveillance. LVT remote surveillance with their solar panel powered solution complete with simple intelligence was on the floor. This intelligence is leverages to identify objects in the video and notify as appropriate. Is your business is looking for warehouse space AND will create 10 jobs or more? Global Site Location Industries collaborates with municipalities around the country. This collaboration allows Global Site Location Industries to offer their assistance for free.
If you warehouse scanners or other mobile technology is missing or you need an extra, ASR Tech was on site and can fix anything. If simply cannot find your products in your warehouse or want to monitor them through the supply chain, Lyngsoe Systems passive RFID has a solution for you. RFID has come a long way with stickers at just .05 each. We also heard about Cirro Fulfillment’s Smart robots as they were to enhance the supply chain. SRSI shared their automated storage and retrieval technology available in all 50 states. In fact, SRSI handles all technology available within the 4 walls of the warehouse. Goods was on display to remind you to focus on your business with their integrated solution handling inventory management, order management, and warehouse management.
As a conference about logistics, there were many logistics companies! Fellowship logistics shared that they can reach 99% of the US in 2 days and 75% in 1 day. Meanwhile, ExFreight was sharing that they provide 100% online capabilities for their entire service logistics offering to 175 countries. C&C logistics serves all continental US and Mexico and can move anything from a single pallet to an entire warehouse.
There were vendors on display with technology for every aspect of your retail business. Shopline intelligent offered a unified commerce platform. There was also a solution called iVision to automate customer loyalty. Admittedly, both solutions intelligence is not yet fully realized compared to many of the technologies analyzed at the Adobe Summit or even Fintech Meetup.
Smart Retail Tech Expo comes to Las Vegas every year. The next Smart Retail Tech Expo will occur April 16 and 17th, 2025, in Las Vegas, NV at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
After 85 flights of stairs, ~40,000 steps, 12 Vegas loops trips, and over 40 factchecks, our coverage of 2024 NAB Show, National Association of Broadcasters Show, ends. NAB Show was held in Las Vegas from April 13-17. It is the premier event for content professionals in the broadcast, media, and entertainment ecosystem seeking to create superior and innovative audio and video experiences. The conference featured over700,000 net square feet of exhibits, nearly 1300 exhibitors, 750 educational courses and sessions, and over 61,000+ attendees from an amazing 163 countries. Attendees witnessed endless examples of cloud enabled remote production, early implementations of generative AI, and discussions on sustainability in production and technical security for remote live production.
The Conference
The first NAB Show was held October 11, 1923, in New York City at the Commodore Hotel. There were 16 radio stations represented among the 23 attendees. NAB Show moved to Las Vegas in 1991.
NAB Show was held April 13-17, 2024, in Las Vegas. The event featured over 61,000 attendees. Within those attendees 27% were international attendees from an amazing 163 countries represented.
The exhibitions featured nearly 1300 exhibitors in over 700,000 net square feet of exhibits a 30% gain over 2023.
Attendees at NABShow held titles such as Production Director, Production Editor, Production Engineer, Broadcast and Network Engineer, Logistics Manager, Electrical Engineer, Sound and Video Engineer, Director of Product Management, Technical Architect, and data scientist.
After 85 flights of stairs and 40,000 steps, and 12 Vegas loops trip, our coverage of the 2024 NAB Show produced by National Association of Broadcasters, ends. NAB Show 2024 exhibitions surpassed last year’s by nearly 30% with 700,000 square feet in all. Attendance came in at 61,000 attendees with 27% coming from international destinations. NABPAC contributors were recognized in the West Hall. The conference leveraged the entire indoor conference exhibit spaces in the West Hall, Central Hall, South Upper and South Lower and a few rooms in North Halls. A majority of North Hall was under construction. Fortunately, the Vegas Loop was running with free rides so one needed not walk the entire distance. We took advantage of the loop no less than a dozen times. When asked attendees reported meeting their business objectives and described it as really good. Once again – the quality of attendees itself was mentioned by the exhibitors. Our entire playlist of video research for NAB Show is available online at our YouTube Channel.
With over 200 exhibitions and over 150 sessions on AI, generative AI was once again the star of the show. Amid the buzz about AI and generative AI transforming broadcasting, one question was on the mind of video engineers – “Will it affect our jobs?”. Luisa Winters had an answer in her keynote. If you are adapting and using the new technologies, you will be fine. No different from the move from tapes. More importantly, you will not only be able to deliver something acceptable but have time to make it great! Another keynote emphasized the importance of great metadata for your assets if you want to fully leverage generative AI solutions in sports coverage. As one might expect, there were countless examples* of tools for production and distribution and each of the tasks involved. Pixellot was on hand with their exciting deep learning automated sports tracking leveraged for streaming sports. Their solution leveraging their state-of-the-art cameras and patented technology that stitches it all together. As would be expected, each sport has its own model. In fact, they had over 10,000 live events streaming as I conducted the interview. Pixellot also includes capabilities for monetizing said sports streams.
One keynote provided a demo of Adobe Premier Pro, something we didn’t recall seeing at Adobe Summit.Backlight showcased their extensive collection of products for media content creation and distribution. Backlight’s solution leverages AI and generative AI to simplify media workflows. Backlight allows horizontal and vertical video distribution. Backlight leverages their own AI and LLM models to transcribe the video/audio. That transcription is then used to quickly generate all the metadata to put on social media. They leverage automation to automate the creation of sports highlight clips out to social media by registering all key moments as the game plays. Finally, their solution also enables monetization.
Amazon and AWS were at NAB Show in full force. A huge display was on hand where they shared their entire Generative AI stack with those looking to develop solutions. Experts were on hand if you had any questions including seeking insights on Amazon Bedrock. In the Microsoft pavilion, SymphonyAI was there as part of the beet the buzzer architecture that enables viewers to play along with game shows. Microsoft offered a Pilot demonstration of AI enabled marketing.
Transcription and translation are a big area for generative AI in broadcasting and media, sometimes referred to as localization. This topic was featured in a keynote as well as in exhibits. Microsoft featured their solution based on Open AI. TRINT featured their text to speech solution adopted across the industry. One exciting development is the ability to do full motion capture without putting on a special suit due to generative AI! In fact, Zerospace Captury was on exhibit sharing their solution. Interestingly, the room only requires about 15 minutes to set up the space to capture motion.
With all of the generative content capabilities shown, stopping misinformation and deepfakes was a very popular topic featured in a keynote. The solution involves knowledge of the content frequently communicated through metadata. To that end, Hand (Human & Digital) shared their solution for identity intelligence for notable talent.
Leveraging capabilities of 5g, XGN featured their solution that enables users to connect direct to mobile to send content from the field – no SIM card required! Cobalt Digital shared their extensive collection of open gear based on 2110, 12G and ultra-low latency. Their gear also supports Rest APIs. Cobalt Digital featured routers, control panels, and multi-viewers for video and audio processing. As might be expected with the continual increased resolution, a new video compression standard is being rolled out and is already rolled out in Brazil, LCEVC. In the LCEVC showcase, all the providers with their next generation of tech leveraging LCEVC were on display. Ateme also focuses on compression – for the purpose of technologies such as the Apple Vision Pro which they showed off in the exhibition. Once you created all your content, if you wanted to manage the programming data so it is accurate in every tv program listing, Titan TV shared their solution. If you wanted to optimize the way in which you manage ad campaigns, Showseeker shared their solution to simplify advertising scheduling.
For those requiring the ability to manage the labor and payroll for that remote labor, Procrewz shared their solution. If keeping track of and on top of all the compliance requirements for broadcast and streaming is your challenge, Vela exhibited their product.
NAB Show also featured technology and solutions to support the creator economy. In Vimeo’s session they stated that one can expect 2% of free YouTube subscribers to convert to a paid subscriber on Vimeo. For those wishing to participate in a reality show about making creators or leverage it for advertising, the team from the TV show Follow Me had a lively panel. The central Main Stage featured an interview with Jennifer Hudson. During the interview Jennifer told the audience that she is always cheering for everyone. A great session on diversity in broadcasting featured the Las Vegas Aces Alysha Clark who majored in broadcasting during her college career. Alysha Clark made the great point to all that inclusion means opening prime spots to diversity be it tv slots or board and executive spots in corporate America.
NAB Show is held every year in Las Vegas since 1991. The next NAB Show will occur April 5-9, 2025, in Las Vegas, NV.
*When vendors’ names are shared as examples in this document, it is to provide a concrete example of what was on display at the conference, not an evaluation or recommendation. Evaluation and recommendation of these vendors are beyond the scope of this specific research document. Other examples products in the same category may have also been on display.
This webinar featured an amazing collection of Women in Tech to inspire your career journey. Come hear their stories, hurdles and triumphs as we celebrate Women’s History Month.
