Another year at RBTE, and everyone at Retail Systems is exhausted after two days of talks, seminars, demonstrations, meetings and new technologies. It was a jam-packed show but we managed to catch more than a few of the highlights.

On Tuesday 13 March, the opening day of the expo at Earls Court 2, Richard Blunt, IT director at Jaegar and Mike Bielinski, CEO of Vodat, educated visitors on the importance of the connected store. Jaegar are doing some wonderfully innovative, but very simple things, such as allowing customers to return online purchases in-store.

Blunt said: "This makes the whole experience much more connected for the customer, who doesn't want to have to go to the Post Office and queue up to send their items back. Plus, once they are in-store they may buy something else instead. It's win-win."

Bielinski stressed the importance of a completely branded shopping experience and told expo-goers that Jaegar, with the help of Vodat, planned to launch their own online payment portal. "Once you have a customer on your site, you want to give them a consistent experience from your brand. That isn't achieved if once they go to pay they have to pay through PayPal or Amazon," Bielinski said.

Next up to speak was Paul Coby, IT director at John Lewis, who spoke about the store of the future. Interestingly, social media was one of the topics highest on his agenda for the future of John Lewis. The retailer actually launched their Christmas ad on YouTube before airing it on TV.

He also spoke about new concept stores opening up that would include beauty clinics and road-test areas for buggies.

Mark Fabes, IT director at McDonald's, spoke on Wednesday 14 March and illuminated delegates as to how the fast food retailer has used technology to become a true family restaurant. They have trialled interactive table surfaces where families can play games as well as gaming zones and iPads for customer use. They have also rolled-out free WiFi and are toying with the idea of online or mobile ordering, Fabes said.

McDonald's are also testing self service kiosks from Wincor Nixdorf and have seen an uplift in use and sales over the trial period. They believe the kiosks will help with queue busting and are more family friendly as even kids can reach the interactive screens. Fabes also shared that McDonald's have tested the idea of mobile ordering and PoS in restaurants, giving staff the ability to take orders from tables.

As well as seminars and talks from retailers there were plenty of Vendor announcements, including the collaboration of Mako Networks, Phoenix Networks and Intechnology as they launched PaySecure Connect. Bill Farmer, CEO of Mako, and Jack McDonnell, CEO at Phoenix, describe their solution as 'PCI compliance in a box'.

The customised central management system delivers cloud-based security management and PCI DSS compliance support to card-present merchants and SMEs.

Commidea also announced their rebrand to VeriFone, after they were recentlty acquired by the payment giant. Paul Holliday, head of marketing & customer proposition at Commidea and Alan Moss, VP for marketing EMEA, VeriFone, both said they were delighted by the move and that Commidea clients would be expecting bigger and better things now they had teamed up with VeriFone.

Roy Ford, IT director at SPAR, used complete point-to-point encryption payment solution from Commidea, to simplify its PCI DSS compliance requirements. Ocius Sentinel helps safeguard the convenience store retailer's customer card payment data.

Ford said: "Before we implemented Sentinel we were getting about 10 per cent polling errors per day from 2,500 stores. That's 250 stores that we would have to manually dial and by the time we got the data sometimes it was two days old. As a retailer you need to submit debit card transactions within five days, otherwise you get a chargeback.

"We had two £5,000 fines over PCI compliance and were told by Visa in no uncertain terms that we had to become compliant."

Ford said the benefits to SPAR have been huge, including the replacement of legacy chip & PIN terminals. SPAR are now able to offer EagleEye Solutions couponing on a local level, so that the offers an promotions in each store can be different.

Ford also said SPAR plans to roll-out contactless payments in the not-to-distant future.

For a full review of the RBTE don't forget to pick up a copy of the April/May Retail Systems.

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