Retail’s $25 Trillion Blind Spot: Paulo Fodor on What the Network Can See
Four out of five retail dollars are still spent in physical stores, exactly where the perfect offer never arrives. Paulo Fodor’s CASA26 talk on location network APIs, physical retail, and why privacy is the product rather than the obstacle.
Paulo Fodor’s CASA26 talk on location network APIs, physical retail, and privacy as the product
Just outside the theatre, on the Nes, two people are walking side by side. One lives nearby and buys fresh fish every Tuesday. The other is a tourist, looking at her phone for somewhere to have lunch. Five metres away there is a supermarket with fresh fish that expires today, and a restaurant with half its tables empty.
Each of them could receive the perfect offer: right product, right context, right moment. Neither does. On the second morning of CASA26, Paulo Fodor, Founder and CEO of Vydens, explained why, and called it a 25 trillion dollar blind spot.
The richest data on the planet, on rented land
No industry knows more about its customers than retail. Decades of loyalty programmes, every purchase on record: what people buy, when they come back, how much they spend. Yet to bring those customers back, retailers rent the audience from the same two platforms as always, and the rent goes up every year. Paulo pointed out that Alphabet itself has named retail as a leading driver of its search growth. Retailers, in his words, built the richest house of data on the planet on rented land.
Then he added the ingredients that make this urgent. Customers expect to be treated as individuals, more so with AI. Retail runs on very thin margins, where rising acquisition costs, stock that sits still and products that expire today all hurt. And the world outside the store changes by the hour: rain, traffic, a concert in town, a football match.
Four out of five retail dollars are still spent in stores
“Paulo, e-commerce already does this,” he anticipated the room saying. True, and that is the point. After twenty years of strong growth, e-commerce takes about 20 cents of every retail dollar. The other 80 cents are still spent in physical stores, exactly where the perfect offer never arrives. That is the blind spot.
The network APIs were designed for this
Here is the turn in the talk. The tools to close that gap already exist. Location-based marketing was part of the thinking behind location network APIs from the start, Paulo argued. CAMARA already specifies device location capabilities that can confirm a person is near a place without GPS and without an app installed, verified by the network itself. No new API needs to be invented.
And yet the ecosystem looks almost entirely at fraud, identity checks and caller ID. Important use cases, he stressed, truly important. But nobody is looking at what may be the largest budget of all: the marketing spend of physical retail.
Privacy is not the barrier. It is the building
Why the neglect? The official answer is one word: privacy. Paulo chose to face it on stage rather than leave it to the legal annexe.
Privacy, he said, is not exactly Big Tech’s strong point. The list of the largest GDPR fines reads like a catalogue of its names, and that makes sense: their model was born treating personal data as raw material, with privacy added later under pressure from regulators. Operators and developers have a luxury Big Tech will never have. They can design from zero, with privacy at the centre from the very first line: explicit consent before any data is used, real data minimisation, and control in the hands of the consumer.
“This is not a barrier to building. This is the building.”
It is why this talk belongs in our Trust series. The same consent and verification that make network signals useful against fraud make them usable for the customer who walks past the right shop at the right moment. Next Thursday, the location panel picks up the argument with Vodafone, Proximus Global, WeVerify and Vydens: what enterprises want from location, and what operators can offer today.
Our thanks to Paulo for pointing the room at a market most of it had not looked at.
More from CASA26
CPaaSAA members have every CASA26 session in full in the member community.
Not a member yet? Tell us you are interested and we will be in touch.
Following the series? New sessions appear here every week until Mobile World Congress. Subscribe on YouTube to catch each one.
CASA26 ran 21–23 September 2026 at the Tobacco Theater in Amsterdam, hosted by CPaaSAA. This is part of our Thursday series on Trust.
