forecourttech Europe 2026: Integration, AI and the human touch

Payments, loyalty, data, people: mobility stations already have the technology for all of it. What they still lack is the glue. forecourttech 2026 brought industry leaders to Alicante to explore how to make it all work as one.

Two days of forecourttech in Alicante came down to one message: the technology for a connected forecourt already exists, and the hard part is making payments, loyalty, data and people work as one system.

Retailers, technology providers and standards bodies from across EMEA and beyond gathered on the Costa Blanca. Conference chair Christian Warning (The Retail Marketeers) and moderator Mark Wohltmann (NACS Global) guided a programme that followed the customer from the first digital touchpoint on the road to the digital receipt. The recurring themes were integration over isolated tools, loyalty beyond the litre, payments shaped by AI agents, and technology that must not push out the human touch.

From the road to the receipt

The opening “digital mile” panel set the tone: the customer relationship no longer starts at the pump. It starts on Google Maps, continues at the price pylon, which must say more than the price, and runs through pump screens, retail media and in-store screens to self-checkout and the digital receipt. As Wohltmann noted in his closing recap, this journey is already here.

The Global Tech Compass panel, with Stephen Lally (Maxol), Guy Bickerstaffe (PriceEasy), Michel Hinefaalar (Haia Consultancy) and Rafael Hernandez (Locatium.AI), framed the pressures behind the shift: labour scarcity, margin compression and digital-first expectations. Its central message was that data is key, and it must not sit in departmental silos.

Jon Thompson of the International Forecourt Standards Forum (IFSF) made the case for standards as strategy. As pricing, payments, loyalty, EV charging and wet stock grow more complex, plug-and-play standards let retailers combine best-in-breed suppliers without costly custom builds. Thompson linked the IFSF roadmap to EU regulation such as the Data Act and invited delegates to help shape the forum’s refreshed strategy. Wohltmann’s one-word summary: interoperability.

Loyalty beyond the litre

Sami Nachawati of Comarch Loyalty asked why loyalty programmes haven’t changed when the forecourt has. In Europe, fuel accounts for 70–75% of sales but only 35–45% of gross profit, while the shop, food and services earn 55–65% of margin on 25–30% of sales. Yet most programmes still reward the litre.

Dwell time is growing, especially with EV charging, but most programmes trigger one action and then go silent. Nachawati listed six reasons to visit a station that need no pump, from coffee and top-up grocery to car wash and parcels. He also set out six ways to modernise: monetise dwell time, build one identity across mobility, serve gig drivers, offer subscriptions instead of discounts, add gamification, and personalise with AI. A Shell × Ferrari case, with members-only content for Shell GO+, showed what rewards money can’t buy look like. Wohltmann’s takeaway: a discount alone is not loyalty.

Alicia Cruzado López showed Repsol putting that thinking into practice. The aim was to build Spain’s largest car wash network and connect every jet wash, vacuum and roller to Waylet, Repsol’s payment and loyalty app with over 10 million users. Customers asked for no tokens, no queues, a digital experience, and clean, well-lit wash areas. Repsol connected around 3,600 pieces of equipment, introduced easy-clean materials and a signature scent, and now offers six subscription models. Around 30% of wash visits include a fuel purchase, and 39% of new subscribers came from competing stations. “It’s about being part of the daily life of our customers,” she said.

SPAR: scale the intelligence, localise the experience

Zsuzsa Hordai, Head of Strategic Projects at SPAR International, brought the view from 50 markets and more than 2,000 forecourt sites. Data platforms, digital ordering, AI insights, cybersecurity and foodservice standards travel; menus, rewards and the customer journey stay local. Italians, she noted, will not buy an Irish pizza.

Generations matter too. Younger shoppers embrace self-checkout, while older ones may feel the retailer is handing them the job. SPAR’s new Dublin flagship with Maxol therefore pairs machine-vision self-checkout, which recognises items without scanning, with staffed tills. In Riyadh, SPAR closed its hypermarkets and now runs convenience stores in high-footfall locations, including a metro station in the King Abdullah Financial District.

Recalling an Asian tea shop where QR ordering had replaced staff entirely, Hordai said SPAR wants to make sure “frictionless never becomes faceless.” Her summary: scale the intelligence, localise the experience, and preserve the human smile.

Payments meet agentic commerce

Neil Halls, Head of Fleet and Mobility at Visa, raised one of the event’s most discussed questions: will your forecourt be preferred by the driver, or selected by an AI agent? As connected cars and AI assistants start choosing where to stop and transact, stations may need to optimise for software as well as people. They will compete on price transparency, real-time inventory, loyalty integration, payment acceptance and reliability scores.

Peter Van Nauw of Dover Fueling Solutions argued that many retailers still run fragmented legacy payment systems. They need a resilient-by-design, omnichannel payment ecosystem that stays secure through disruption.

“Payment has a predominant position here, especially with agentic commerce. I see a lot of opportunities for us as retailers to make the customer journey frictionless. But combined with NIS2, we really have to be aware: there is a business to maintain, and if we are hit by cyberattacks, we are out of business,” said Alex Sanchez, Lead Business IT Infrastructure Expert at Q8.

Good friction and the basics of retail

The second day opened with a fireside conversation led by Christian Warning with Niall Boland (Maxol), Anders R. Edvardsen (Circle K) and JP Flack (PDI Technologies). Its key idea was “good friction.” Technology should remove the friction customers dislike while keeping the dwell time and human interaction people value. The goal is not to cut headcount but to put staff where they matter most.

MobilityPlaza hosted a roundtable with Baba Shettima Kukawa (NNPC Limited), Darío Maldonado (Galp) and Frodi Hammer (A2i). Kukawa described how NNPC is building loyalty and digital services from scratch across around 1,000 Nigerian stations handling some 250,000 transactions a day, including a new fuel app now being tested at unmanned pilot sites. Maldonado showed what customer analytics looks like in practice in Spain and Portugal, from segmentation and propensity models to checking whether a promotion truly added sales or simply shifted them. Hammer explained where pricing really drives footfall, and how agentic AI may soon decide which site, and which offer, a driver chooses.

The orchestration layer: retailer meets supplier

The final panel, moderated by Wohltmann, set Frederick Beckmann, CEO of Q1 Energie, against solution providers Harald Pöpke (Scheidt & Bachmann) and Tal Ginat (Reins). Beckmann warned that integration is never as easy or as free as promised. “You have to make sure that you do not take complexity from the forecourt to the back office,” he said. Every integration needs a clear purpose.

On make or buy, he was firm. Payment and loyalty services can be bought or rented, but customer data, identity and loyalty rules stay in-house. “I would never give away the ownership of the customer,” he said.

Ginat said more retailers now see the need to innovate, but they must do it alongside daily operational firefighting. Pöpke noted that the forecourt has many standards but the wider retail world far fewer, and that the cloud raises the bar on security. The panel agreed cybersecurity is an unavoidable cost. For Q1, a regulated critical-infrastructure operator in Germany, it is about keeping the business running. A breach, as one panellist put it, is not a question of if, but when.

Stephen Bodzan, founder of forecourttech, announced the inaugural edition of forecourttech LATAM, organised in association with NTT DATA. The event will take place in Cancún on 10–11 March 2027.

Our video report features voices from Valero, Wonderline, Q8 and Manako, along with forecourttech founder Stephen Bodzan.