Thought Leadership

NRF Europe Paris 2026: What Retailers Want From Their Stores, and From Their Technology

The store is becoming a relationship, not just a transaction

The store is being talked about less as a place a transaction happens and more as a place a relationship gets built, and that idea ran through a lot of what came out of NRF Europe Paris this year. Retailers pointed to their stores functioning as spaces for experience and community, in part because it’s getting harder for the transaction itself to be the differentiator, checkout is faster and easier almost everywhere now, so what happens around it, and because of it, has to carry more of the weight.

Technology should serve the experience, not sit on top of it

That idea lands the same way for us every time we hear it: the technology in a store only matters if it’s actually in service of that experience, not stacked on top of it for its own sake. A checkout can be effective and still forgettable. The stores getting real credit for it are the ones where every piece of the experience, including the transaction, feels like part of the same relationship rather than a separate, disconnected step.

What retailers told us at our stand

That’s exactly the disconnect retailers described to us directly at our own stand. They want that kind of connected, relationship-driven experience, but told us plainly that the platforms they’re running now make it hard to build. Real fatigue with the monolithic systems so many of them are still on. Costly, complicated upgrades nobody wants to be the one to kick off. Genuine uncertainty about what the platform even needs to look like a few years from now. Legacy systems actively getting in the way of the commerce priorities they’re trying to move on. Retailers know what kind of experience and relationship they want their stores to deliver, and increasingly they know what they want from the platform underneath it too: something fast to stand up, flexible enough to keep pace with them, forward-thinking rather than a patch on the past, and extendable enough that they won’t be back having this same conversation in a few years.

Shaun Britton

VP EMEA & APAC

Shaun Britton leads Jumpmind’s commercial growth across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific — building the business, the team, and the pipeline in some of the world’s most competitive retail markets.

With over two decades in retail technology, Shaun has spent his career helping enterprise retailers modernise their store technology through complex, consultative sales. He has held senior roles at Mercaux and Aptos, working with tier-one retailers across EMEA on large-scale POS and omnichannel transformation programmes.

He joined Jumpmind to spearhead its EMEA launch — establishing UK and Ireland operations from scratch — and has since expanded scope to cover APAC. The draw was simple: a genuinely differentiated product, a growing market need, and the chance to build something.

Based in the UK, Shaun works closely with retailers navigating the shift away from legacy store technology toward modern, cloud-native, device-independent POS — and has a clear view on why so many get stuck, and how to move forward.