ALEXANDRIA, Va.—Conexxus and the International Forecourt Standards Forum (IFSF) have announced the signing of a Global Standards Development and Cross Licensing Agreement that will pave the way for future global collaboration, resulting in international standards and an API Data Dictionary for the retail fuels and convenience industry.

This agreement builds upon the collaborative work that IFSF and Conexxus have been doing and further formalizes the infrastructure and processes for joint work product and resulting API standards.

“Standards allow implementers to write once and implement many, thus reducing the time to market and barrier of entry for core functionality,” said Linda Toth, managing director of Conexxus. “This allows implementers to focus on innovation and other differentiators.”

The data dictionary, by clearly defining data elements common in Conexxus’ operations, enables easy sharing of data with partners and faster creation of data lakes for the next phase of business analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“The large number of global vendors serving this industry—largely with proprietary data meanings and interfaces—creates unnecessary technical debt and inability to quickly innovate,” said Gray Taylor, executive director of Conexxus. “This increases costs and missed opportunities for our retailers.”

This initiative and the formalized agreement are the result of a detailed analysis of how both Conexxus and IFSF can better serve their membership in the face of increasing disruption in our retail segment.

Global standards benefit retailers no matter where they do business.

“Even retailers doing business in one country benefit from global standards,” said Ian Brown, API strategy manager, IFSF. “Suppliers can implement one standard no matter the country of use which means resources are freed from doing multiple developments for the same functionality.”

“Although each market has its own nuances, there are a number of global trends that are impacting our industry; increasingly global standards are becoming more important as we keep pace with fast-moving technologies,” said Carl Jones, program manager of IFSF. “This agreement ensures that one standard exists, where applicable, for all global markets.”