forecourttech June 19

forecourttech
problem but Outdoor Payment Terminals (OPTs) required a
whole new level of resource; time, manpower and financial.
Very high levels of the available capital expenditure across
the whole landscape was spent on non-discretionary projects
to just keep up with PCI requirements. The lack of interoperability
between the equipment of different vendors,
or even different generations from the same vendor just
added to the time and resource required to keep up.
A decade on, the demands are much more exciting but
equally as challenging. The emerging new consumer
expects to be able to order and pay for everything on
smartphones and their loyalty points to be automatically
saved and applied at the touch of an icon. The advent of
mobile payment and loyalty applications has really tested
forecourt technology designed in what was frankly a different
era.
The simple graphic below shows the number of messages
required to be exchanged between applications on the
ground and in the cloud to enable a single mobile payment
transaction. With standardised interfaces, these types
of projects are challenging enough. Without standards,
projects are doomed to be outdated before they even get
to testing.
This is not about saving retailer costs, it is about finding the
resource to carry out all of the work demanded by our consumers.
The aim of IFSF is to allow vendors and retailers to
concentrate their efforts and skills on developing exciting
new technologies at the consumer end, by standardising
the interfaces behind the consumer facing application.
With new technology vendors entering this space, we all
need to be enabling our retail customers to select the
combination of cloud services they need to provide their
marketing value proposition.
For the last four years IFSF has focused its development
funding on APIs, building a strategy, a roadmap and a
platform whilst developing Fuel Retailing API Collections. In
mid-2018 we launched a common Fuel Retailing Data Dictionary
with Conexxus who work in this field in the US. The
data dictionary acts as the focal point for our growing API
libraries, ensuring terminology around things as simple as
dates, currency, country, unit of measure and equipment
names are fully aligned. We have a Joint Workgroup for
APIs with our technical expert friends from Conexxus that
meets regularly to take this work forward.
Earlier this year a review was performed by REPL (a major
API consultancy), which provided a reality check to ensure
our chosen IFSF platform and architecture was aligned with
current industry best practice. Early results confirm our selections
are as future proofed as possible and the selected
strategy, chosen platform and tools and applications are
sound.
The IFSF team continues to upgrade its standards, test
tools, simulators and self-certification test engines from
their old existing XML-based architecture to API based
web standards.
However, there is still much to be done. Despite the acknowledged
benefits realised through the use of technical
standards in retail petroleum and other sectors internationally,
their adoption is far from universal. IFSF will continue
to work with its partners to promote and evolve these
standards while encouraging all stakeholders to join them.
If you would like to know more about the work of the IFSF,
its annual conference is open to all in the Retail Fuels
industry, visit IFSF.org for further details. If you would like to
speak with them directly, please contact the team on +44
1787 221025.
pageseventeen
Simplified Mobile Payment Architecture
Heather Price will Chair the speaker
programme at forecourttech ’19. She
will be joined by IFSF Projects
Manager, John Carrier who will discuss
‘APIs - Powering Innovation in Fuel
Retailing’
For more information on John’s talk and
other presentations please visit
www.forecourttech.com
A very simplified example of mobile fuel dispenser management and the many
interfaces required between the applications. It gives an insight into the
complexity of such a process, and why standards are so beneficial.
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