T-Mobile Austria is taking the opportunity to upgrade to the NTS Retail Suite X4 in order to get ready for the Austrian Cash Register Security Regulation (RKSV) that is to become effective on April 1, 2017. In about 50 shops, the wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deutsche Telekom AG constantly offers its 4.3m customers great service and attractive offers.

Just like all Austrian companies, T-Mobile is also affected by the regulations put in place by the RKSV that is about to become effective this spring. Especially noteworthy in this context are the provisions regarding a respective technical security device for protection against manipulation, the related cryptographic signature of each cash transaction as well as the need for printing the signature on the corresponding receipt and for keeping a respective data collection protocol.

Following the legal requirements of the RKSV, there are also special prerequisites to be fulfilled by the used receipt printers. These, for example, must be able to process the QR code that is automatically generated and transmitted by the system and print it on the respective receipt. In the standard version of the NTS Retail Suite X4, the required digital signature is created using the certification service provider A-Trust's "a.sign RK ONLINE" product (i.e., via certificate including signature creation web service). Doing so, the individual signature requests of cash registers sharing the same certificate are processed sequentially.

Generally speaking, one certificate per company would already be sufficient, however, it is still recommended to use a separate certificate for each location in order to keep the time needed for completing the checkout process as short as possible. In addition to the above mentioned points, the system also automatically keeps the likewise required data collection protocol. In case of a cash register operations audit, it can be exported for further inspection.

T-Mobile’s upgrade to the X4 version of the tried-and-true NTS Retail Suite was already completed by the end of February. The comparatively short timeframe for the implementation of the by Austrian standards relatively large project — that also included an adaption of several customer-specific enhancements — posed absolutely no problems for the experience software experts at NTS Retail.