DIARY RETAIL TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
pilot,
RetailTechnology.co.uk, 16 January 2014). Retail T
echnology also spoke with
digital display company Displaydata (formerly ZBD Solutions) at EuroCIS this year about the role that other wireless communications technologies may play in the store. “We’ve made the decision not to include NFC [near-field communications] technology in our ‘epop’ ESL [electronic shelf-edge label] roadmap,” said Jacquie Boast, Displaydata global sales and marketing senior vice president. “In terms of interaction with customers Bluetooth low-energy beacons will instead allow retailers to integrate messaging with other store applications and zone transmission areas from as little 8 to 10 centimetres from the shelf-edge and up to 10 feet away. This will enable special, targeted outbound promotions around entire sections of a store, say for TVs or in the cereal aisles, for example.” Only last month premium London
shopping destination, Regent Street, announced plans to become the first shopping street in Europe to pioneer the use of Bluetooth beacon technology for push notification marketing campaigns. Consumers along the 2-kilometre High Street will be able to receive personalised content and alerts via Bluetooth about new products, upcoming events and offers only available that day via a smartphone app that communicates with beacons in each store (London
’ s Regent
Street pioneers beacon technology,
RetailTechnology.co.uk, 9 June 2014). The focus of the UK industry’s main
trade show, Retail Business Technology Expo in March, moved from the store to more strategic technology trends around the growing importance of ‘Big Data’ and security, in addition to store communications and digital engagement. Tom O’Kill, marketing and operations director at physical security and display systems developer Unique secure, said the lessons learned from
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
considerations into multichannel business strategies. “We’ve continued to build out a
platform for contactless, P2P [point- to-point] encryption, unattended PoS, for example, that brings all of the multichannel pieces together,” he said. “Tokenisation can be used in a ‘click & collect’ scenario too as another example.” Byrne predicted that mobile
data breaches suffered by the likes of Target at the beginning of this year had sharpened retail minds to the threats posed at the application layer and the PoS (T
arget provides update on breach,
RetailTechnology.co.uk, 13 January 2014). “The latest version of the PCI
[Payment Card Industry] Data Security Standard mandates that retailers must protect PoS hardware from tamper, and that includes any PIN device,” O’Kill said. “So retailers, particularly those looking at deploying mobile PoS solutions, should be thinking about integrating anti-tamper harnesses, docks and locks to enhance the physical security of devices – modular solutions enable retailers to upgrade existing investments too.” Physical PoS security development
is one of many areas retailers must increasingly consider when operating across multiple channels. Fintan Byrne, executive vice president and managing director of the Payment Gateway Solutions business at Transaction Network Services advised retailers to include payment and security
DATES FOR THE DIARY
EuroCIS 2015 will take place from 24 to 26 February at the Messe Düsseldorf in Germany
Retail Technology Business Expo 2015 will take place from 10 to 11 March at Olympia in London
payments would play a growing role in multichannel retailing. “There are key considerations that will influence when to invest [in mobile payments],” he added. “There are sector-specific requirements, use cases by channel and legacy system refresh cycles, for instance. “All the factors need to come
together to gain a level of traction, where contactless laid the ground for EMV chips, and even that roll out took years. The defining point will be who holds the card data, where the importance of the data and its ownership is addressed in a way that offers both security and simplicity will be key.” While security and simplicity have
been keywords in the payments arena, data would always be king for Branden Jenkins, global retail general manager at cloud-based management software provider NetSuite, during his first time as an exhibitor at Retail Business Technology Expo. “Our core value is a single system to run your business, enabling one seamless view of customer and inventory regardless of channel or location,” he explained. Jenkins said the Expo had been
helping in gauging retailer sentiment in the UK and wider European region. “We’re answering more questions about how to support multiple business-to- business and business-to-consumer models moving across channels and going global than we are about cloud,” he explained. “Cloud is more often now seen as a great enabler, offering both agility and scalability.”
Spring/Summer 2014 09
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