Retail Rundown Podcast
NRF 2020: Retail’s Big Show Special

Industry experts Tony D’Onofrio, Ricardo Belmar, Paul Lewis and Doug Stephens share their thoughts on this year's conference in a podcast episode here. 

Here are key takeaways on this year's NRF Big Show from Tony D'Onofrio, Global Retail Influencer:

One of the great things that I get to do at NRF is to attend an event called the Retail ROI. At that event, they unveiled the 2020 Store Experience Study, which will be published later this month. From that study, the top three strategic priorities for 2020 are personalizing the customer experience, inventory visibility and empowering store associates. And that really ties well into some of the key trends that I was observing at NRF. This actually was a very good and NRF for me. I’m exhausted after 60,000 steps over the four days that I attended.

The number one trend that I saw at NRF is the progress of the camera as now a data sensor. Having spent half of my career in security, interesting to see how the camera has evolved and what computer vision looks like today. This visual technology coupled with artificial intelligence was highly visible on both the main show floor and in the startup showcase area. Applications included inventory visibility, security, and face recognition. This is one of the key trends that I will be wring about.

The trend other is how retailer are looking for that competitive advantage. If you entered the startup area and asked for retail references, you would be surprised to hear the multiple innovative retail brands not just testing advanced technologies, but active in deployments. Retailers are looking for that edge on how to get ahead and increasingly that is technology.

I do see retailers also getting a lot more engaged overall. More of the NRF booths, for example, had retail logos or retailers participating in the demonstrations. This is good news for both technology companies and for retailers because it means we are actually developing solutions that will have a positive impact in the industry.

Great to see at this NRF that we are working on giving store associates better digital tools to make them more productive and eventually become what I call the brand ambassadors. This is critical as today's consumers are walking into stores with their smartphones which often makes them much more knowledgeable than store associates. The digital conversation is getting better with the greater focus on the humans working in the store.

2020 is that perfect vision year that many folks had written about as delivering the future of retail. What I am seeing first of all is that the retail apocalypse is overhyped. We are coming off a strong year. Retailers, especially strong brands are making the right investments to get closer to consumers and engage them across channels. This year you even saw Amazon coming to NRF with a large presence showcasing their web services. Another example of that bridge between online and offline which is critical. rethink.industries

#1 Trend: LP’s Cameras Are Now Data Sensors
Computer Vision is at the Center of it All
2020 - The Future is Here

NASP Begins 2020 with the Continued Expansion of its Advisory Committee

Continuing to build on the 2019 launch of the National Shoplifting Prevention Coalition, a project of its Advisory Committee, the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention (NASP) is delighted to announce the addition of Pamela Velose, Vice President, Asset Protection and Safety at Belk. Continuing to add diverse points of view to its Advisory Committee supports the organization’s focus on connecting retailers and criminal justice to support collaborative efforts to reduce shoplifter recidivism, which, in addition to saving police, prosecutor and retail resources, will reduce ongoing theft activity and improve safety in stores and communities alike.

“We are always humbled by the willingness of leaders like Pamela to be part of the industry effort to examine progressive alternatives to an age-old problem. The level of collaboration between these retailers is truly gratifying as we work to alter how the nation thinks about shoplifting prevention in the age of criminal justice reform,” noted NASP Executive Director Caroline Kochman. “We are already seeing the power of the collective voice of the veteran asset protection leaders assembled on this committee in creating a paradigm shift in the approach taken by retailers, criminal justice and communities around the country.”

Pamela brings over 20 years of retail industry experience to the NASP Advisory Committee. Before beginning her career at Belk, she spent more than 16 years at Macy’s where she led and developed the investigations programs for both internal investigations and Organized Retail Crime programs. Her hands on approach and strong operational skills will provide tremendous benefit as the Coalition begins to operationalize its 2020 activities.

Read More Here
 

FBI Releases 2019 Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report

Violent and Property Crime Show Decrease from 2018 Statistics

Preliminary statistics show overall declines in both violent and property crime in the first half of 2019 compared to the same time frame the previous year, according to FBI crime statistics released today.

The Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report covers January through June 2019. It contains data from more than 14,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide that voluntarily submitted information to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.

According to the report, all categories of violent crime offenses decreased between the first half of 2018 and the first half of 2019, including:

● Robbery (-7.4 percent)
● Rape (-7.3 percent)
● Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter (-3.9 percent)
● Aggravated assault (-0.3 percent)

Property crime also declined during the same period, specifically:

● Burglary (-11.1 percent)
● Motor vehicle theft (-6.7 percent)
● Larceny-theft (-4.2 percent)
● In the property crime category, offenses dropped 5.6 percent. Burglaries were down 11.1 percent, motor vehicle thefts decreased 6.7 percent, and larceny- thefts declined 4.2 percent
fbi.gov

What the CIO's Read
4 Innovative Facial Recognition Use Cases For Retailers

Facial recognition is one of the most important technologies driving future stores.
Here's how:

In addition to mobile applications, the sharpest minds in the retail industry are combining technologies including, facial recognition, to create the retail stores of the future.

Preventing Retail Crimes

Improving Customer Experience - Instantly recognizing customers and sending customized text messages offering recommendations, discounts, and other offers.

Offering in-Store Assistance - Sending meaningful alerts to employees to enhance and assist the customer. Integrating a wide variety of retail solutions including, customer relationship management, loyality systems, point of sales, and more.

Fine-Tuning Store Experience - Connecting the customers online and offline behaviors and structure boundary-free shopping navigation. Revealing customer data such as age, gender, race, and areas where they linger in the store.

With digital devices already putting facial recognition into power, the technology is poised to spread dramatically in the coming years. cioapplications.com

What the CFO's Read
Workplace Class Actions: The Threat Keeps Growing

Class action litigation mania didn't abate last year.
Here are five of the hottest trends heading into 2020.

The prosecution of workplace class action litigation by the plaintiffs’ bar continues to escalate, as it has for more than a decade. Importantly, class actions increasingly pose unique “bet-the-company” risks for employers.

As has become readily apparent in the #MeToo era, an adverse judgment in a class action has the potential to bankrupt a business. Further, adverse publicity can eviscerate a company’s market share. Likewise, the ongoing defense of a class action can drain corporate resources long before the case reaches a decision point.

Companies that do business in multiple states are also susceptible to “copy-cat” class actions, whereby plaintiffs’ lawyers create a domino effect of litigation filings that challenge corporate policies and practices in numerous jurisdictions at the same time. This risk is particularly acute in wage-and-hour cases.

Skilled plaintiffs’ class action lawyers and governmental enforcement litigators are not making this challenge any easier for companies. They are continuing to develop new theories and approaches to the successful prosecution of complex employment litigation and government-backed lawsuits. New rulings by federal and state courts have added to this patchwork quilt of compliance problems and litigation management issues. cfo.com

Luxury Brands Vacate Hong Kong Leases
Hong Kong Protests Decimate Luxury Retailers

As the retail luster of Hong Kong dissipates, luxury fashion retail brands LVMH and Prada are dropping their leases. At the same time, prime retail rents fell late last year as social unrest impact commerce and discouraged many of the Mainland China visitors who back luxury demand from visiting, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Brokers indicated per the report that La Perla and Prada SpA both intend to leave Russell Street this year, and Prada is not forecast to renew a lease that concludes in the summer. Chow Tai Fook Jewelry Group, a local jewelry heavyweight, plans to shutter as many as 15 stores. pymnts.com

Financial Industry & PCI SSC Collaboration Creates Unified PIN Standard
A joint collaboration between PCI SSC and ASC X9 to created a unified PIN standard with Troy Leach, Senior Vice President, of the PCI SSC and Steve Stevens, Executive Director of ASC X9. In response to industry feedback, the Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. (ASC X9) and the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) have recently completed a joint initiative to create one unified PIN Security Standard for payments stakeholders.

Steve Stevens: In 2018, ASC X9 Financial Industry Standards (“X9”) and the PCI Security Standards Council (“PCI”) combined the X9 TR 39 technical report with the PCI PIN Security – Requirements and Testing Procedures standard. Members of X9 and PCI worked together to combine the two documents. The PCI standard can be downloaded here: PIN Security – Requirements and Testing Procedures standard.

Troy Leach: The outcome of this effort is a simplified PIN standard and assessor program for payment card industry stakeholders. pcisecuritystandards.org

SHRM Series: Part 1
Workplace Drug Testing: Weighing the Pros and Cons
Employers must provide a safe work environment, and they want to ensure their employees are productive, but is maintaining a drug-testing program in furtherance of these goals worth the hassle? The answer may depend on the workplace.

Some employers are federal contractors or hire drivers and have to follow specific drug-free workplace laws. Other employers are struggling to find qualified employees or want to maintain a certain culture and think that drug testing - particularly for marijuana - will hinder their ability to attract and retain talent.

Risks and Rewards - Consider When to Test - Think About the Job's Safety Risks shrm.org

Coresight Research:
Four Roll-Over Trends To Watch from 2019
We also note four trends that we identified for 2019 that we expect to continue to be highly relevant in 2020:

● Expect to see more spectacular retail, with brand-building flagship stores.

● Physical retail will see more fast retail, with short leases and more pop-up stores.

● Expect more frictionless retail: Retailers will turn to technologies that remove the traditional pain points of brick-and-mortar retail.

● Artificial intelligence will remain retailers’ go-to technology. coresight.com

What the CEO's Read
JCP Reboot
A Shiny Penney Opens Amidst the Tarnish
Imagine a JC Penney store where the layout is modern and cool, where there are extras like hair salons, shoe repair, video games, copious seating throughout the store; where the merchandise is smart but right for the customer base and where you might even run into the ghost of Ron Johnson.

This past November, Penney reopened the store as a test lab (Hurst, TX.) for the kinds of merchandising initiatives it could bring to some of its 850 or so stores. Of course, the retailing clock is ticking for Penney, which is struggling through declining sales, sketchy financials and a looming deadline from creditors deeply worried about its long-term prospects. It doesn’t help that the retailer competes in the ever-shrinking middle market, neither low-price fish nor luxury fowl in an increasingly bipolar marketplace.

The Penney store in Hurst touts in both its signage and regular in-store announcements that it is “Brand new…and just for you,” and indeed it measures up to both. At its opening, CEO Jill Soltou, who has come under criticism for not moving fast enough to turn around the retailer, emphasized this was not a prototype that would be rolled out chain wise, but was instead “an investment in our future.” Speaking to the Dallas Morning News, she said the store “is the fullest articulation of our brand strategy and we’re going to use it as a lab.” therobinreport.com

VF Corp. considers selling off 9 'occupational' brands
VF said that the review is in line with its focus to transform into a more consumer-minded and retail-centric enterprise, with a portfolio of growth-oriented active, outdoor and work brands.

“Divesting these brands would leave VF with a simplified portfolio of higher-growth, consumer-focused brands, while providing financial flexibility to fuel further strategic initiatives and enhance shareholder value,” said Steve Rendle, VF’s chairman, president and CEO, whose brands include Vans, The North Face, Timberland and Dickies. chainstoreage.com

To Be a Great Leader, You Need the Right Mindset
Mindsets are leaders’ mental lenses that dictate what information they take in and use to make sense of and navigate the situations they encounter. Simply, mindsets drive what leaders do and why.

Four distinct sets of mindsets that have been found to affect leaders’ ability to engage with others, navigate change more successfully, and perform in their leadership roles more effectively.

Where's your mindset? Read on and find out: 4 Mindsets

UL Concludes Investigation of Alarm Panels

247 Breach Notifications Per Day
GDPR Update: More Than 160,000 Data Breach Notifications Reports
Data protection regulators have imposed $126 million (EUR114 million) in fines under the GDPR regime for a wide range of GDPR infringements, not just for data breaches. 

According to the DLA Piper's latest GDPR Data Breach Survey, France, Germany and Austria top the rankings for the total value of GDPR fines imposed with just more than $56.5 million, $26.1 million and $19.9 million respectively. The Netherlands, Germany and the UK topped the table for the number of data breaches notified to regulators with 40,647, 37,636 and 22,181 notifications each.

For the period from May 25, 2018 to January 27, 2019 there were on average 247 breach notifications per day. For the period from January 28, 2019 to January 27, 2020 there were on average 278 breach notifications per day (a 12.6 percent increase), so the current trend for breach notifications is upwards. securitymagazine.com

How to Decide on Your Company’s IT Security Budget
Global spending on information security products and services has been on the rise for years. According to Gartner, budgets have grown from $114 billion in 2018 to a forecasted growth of more than $124 billion in 2019. IT security leaders in enterprises agree, with 72 percent saying that their budget will increase in 2020. With more money being allocated for information security, it’s interesting to see how these investments are actually shaped.

From my experience, there are two ways to decide about the future. One option is to rely on your intuition and previous experience or simply follow prior protocols. The other is to analyze your unique situation, break it down into small details and try to calculate the probability of these details changing in the near future.

With this in mind, let's take a deeper look at how different companies plan their IT security spending and what we can learn from these two approaches.

A Risk-Based Approach securitymagazine.com

NIST Privacy Framework 1.0: Manage privacy risk, demonstrate compliance
Our data-driven society has a tricky balancing act to perform: building innovative products and services that use personal data while still protecting people’s privacy. To help organizations keep this balance, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is offering a new tool for managing privacy risk.

Version 1.0 of the NIST Privacy Framework

The agency has just released Version 1.0 of the NIST Privacy Framework: A Tool for Improving Privacy through Enterprise Risk Management. Developed from a draft version in collaboration with a range of stakeholders, the framework provides a useful set of privacy protection strategies for organizations that wish to improve their approach to using and protecting personal data.

The publication also provides clarification about privacy risk management concepts and the relationship between the Privacy Framework and NIST’s Cybersecurity Framework.

“Privacy is more important than ever in today’s digital age,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Walter G. Copan.

Helping organizations manage privacy risk

The NIST Privacy Framework is not a law or regulation, but rather a voluntary tool that can help organizations manage privacy risk arising from their products and services, as well as demonstrate compliance with laws that may affect them, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. It helps organizations identify the privacy outcomes they want to achieve and then prioritize the actions needed to do so.

“What you’ll find in the framework are building blocks that can help you achieve your privacy goals, which may include laws your organization needs to follow,” said Naomi Lefkovitz, a senior privacy policy adviser at NIST and leader of the framework effort. helpnetsecurity.com

So far, under California’s new privacy law, firms are disclosing too little data - or far too much

Calif. AG Office Only Has 2 Dozen Agents For 40M People
& Expects to Prosecute 3 Cases Per Year

Enforcement will not start for months and is underfunded

The measure was supposed to provide consumers more transparency about their data. It’s looking more like a muddle.

But disclosure in the first few weeks under the law has run the gamut. Some companies have incorrect information on their websites about how the law affects them and consumers. Most companies acknowledge requests with emails or text messages, while other requests seem to disappear once filed. And once obtained, the volumes of data create a new burden for consumers — how to manage it.

“Compliance is all over the map and will be until the rules are clear and there are actual penalties for noncompliance,” said Mary Stone Ross, who helped design the legislation and is now associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“Companies are viewing the effective date as July,” Ross said. “There are many things we are just not going to know right now, particularly the inferences companies make about you based on your data.”

The office of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) will have only about two dozen agents assigned to enforcement in a state with 40 million people. At an April state Senate hearing, the state’s supervising deputy attorney general on consumer protection said she will probably be able to prosecute just three cases per year.

The law survived fierce lobbying by the tech-backed Internet Association and the California Chamber of Commerce. An August report commissioned by Becerra’s office estimated compliance with the CCPA could cost companies $55 billion initially and as much as an additional $16 billion over the course of the next 10 years.

Tech companies appear to be counting on a grace period to figure out compliance. The law also gives companies 45 days to respond to requests and the right to an extension beyond that.

“Everyone seems to be putting their toe into the water to see what they can get away with,” Rabins said. “I hate to say it, but I think the companies are going to win.” washingtonpost.com

N.Y. Senator Carlucci Introduces Bill That Prohibits Paying Ransom
The bill prohibits municipal corporations or other government entities from paying ransom in the event of a cyber-attack against them. In addition, the bill defines a cyber attack as "a virtual attack against the critical infrastructure, as defined in subdivision five of section eighty-six of the public officers law, of a municipal corporation or other government entity."

“This legislation will make it clear that those looking to do harm, looking to make money by instituting ran somewhere tax, that they won’t be profitable because it’ll be illegal for municipalities to pay their ransom,” Carlucci said, according to WSYR-TV. securitymagazine.com

How IT Can Get Predictive Analytics Right
A key to enterprise success with predictive analytics is to get the IT group involved, and do it early in the process.

When tasked with preparing a predictive model, an analyst must ask what is the best approach for the initiative. When IT personnel are included in the initial stages, the answers can address different facets of the project, revealing ideas that may not be so obvious from the start.

Taking digital inventory - Identify the data's quality - Select the best features at the lowest cost informationweek.com