Saturday, August 16, 2008

Direct Response Forum

I just returned from what I think is about my 10th Direct Response Forum. The DRF has been around for 19 years. Polly Bauer (polly@pollyabauer.com) did an excellent opening keynote and recounted the history of the DRF. Polly was one of the original founders. The DRF was founded to bring together Card Not Present (CNP) merchants, their card processors (Paymentech, First Data, Transfirst, etc.) and the card associations/brands (Visa, MasterCard, etc.) to help deal with the gap that did (and in many cases still) exists between the needs of these merchants and the payment card rules and processes which were created for face-to-face transactions. There were approximately 500 attendees at this year's conference in beautiful San Diego. (During my time at CyberSource I had the pleasure of being on the Advisory Board and speaking numerous times). The attendees include representatives of the CNP merchants, both newbees and veterans, often from operations, cash management or fraud management along with reps from the card brands, processors and various technology providers. Vendors can only attend if they already have DRF member merchants as existing clients. For anyone that is involved in the CNP space (which includes mail order/telephone order and ecommerce) this is a must attend event for both the content and networking opportunities.