ARTS Debuts Global Payment Standard

NEW YORK – A new global standard for retail payments designed to help exchange data between payment terminals and POS terminals and support new payment technologies has been released by the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) and EPASOrg, which sets card payment standards in Europe.

The standard — called the ARTS-EPAS Retailer Payment Protocol — will “easily allow retailers to integrate payment systems on one side with POS systems on the other,” said Tim Hood, client solution architect for retail, SAP, during a presentation this month at the National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention & Expo held here. ARTS is the NRF’s technology standards division.

The standard will be based on state-of-the-art technologies, such as XML, to ensure interoperability between different sale environments, and was developed by a team of experts from Europe, Canada and the United States. It was developed to accommodate changes in payment forms such as mobile payments, EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) chips, contactless cards and prepaid instruments, said Hood.

The specifications for the standard, which would apply to the design of POS systems and payment terminals, will be available for free beginning in the first quarter of 2012.

ARTS also this month released an educational white paper, the ARTS Social Retailing Blueprint, which is aimed at helping retailers to understand how to leverage social media for their businesses.

The white paper addresses social media goals, such as enforcing brand image, attracting shoppers and increasing loyalty, as well as strategies such as understanding and engaging shoppers and “poaching customers from the competition,” said Darrell Sandefur, director of ecommerce architecture for Luxottica Retail and a former IT executive for Kroger. It also looks at social media tactics including check-ins, Facebook commerce and chatter analysis.

The ARTS Social Retailing Blueprint is free to NRF, Shop.org and ARTS members and can be downloaded by visiting http://bit.ly/yJ0Txq. It is available for a nominal fee to non-members from the NRF Store.