retail environment
Leadership and legacy - LP and the disconnected crime eco-system
Loss prevention across the retail sector is operating as a disconnected crime eco-system where spiralling security costs are providing an increasingly poor return on shared intelligence and overall investment.
This is the working hypothesis of a series of articles commissioned by global software and technology innovation giant Fujitsu UK working in conjunction with ORIS Media to understand the retail threat landscape and how advances have introduced new ways to automate more effective intervention strategies to plug what it describes as ‘the intelligence gap’ that is thwarting joined-up thinking on both prevention and prosecution.
Over the next few issues of LP Insider Europe, Fujitsu UK, in collaboration with industry experts, will be exploring the issues in order to provide a road map on how to future-proof asset protection and solve what it calls ‘the security ROI paradox.
This will culminate in a wider industry debate and the outcomes of a webinar commissioned by Fujitsu UK with ORIS Media which will be published in the winter issue of the award-winning Loss Prevention Magazine Europe in December 2026.
The articles will explore why current security and LP investments are falling short, but also how new effective interventions have been made possible through integration and automation.
According to the 2026 BRC Crime Report, retailers have spent more than £5 billion over the last five years on technology as a result of deter rather than detain strategies, but this has failed in terms of reducing record levels of store theft because of the inability to utilise and harness the real time data from largely passive legacy systems.
“The core issue is we are asking overstretched store teams to manually spot, log, and report crime,” said David Nicholls, chief technology officer for Fujitsu UK.
“Even with brilliant macro-initiatives like Opal and the forthcoming Retail Fusion Cell, national intelligence is only as good as the data fed into it.
If local stores don't capture the incident in real-time, the data gap remains open, and prolific offenders remain invisible,” he added.
Coupled with what has been described as the ‘Sentencing Pressure Cooker’ resulting from the potential for more ‘community-based’ justice as an outcome of the 2026 Sentencing Act, the hypothesis follows that there is potential for even the most prolific shoplifters evading prison as a result of under-reporting of multiple offending.
“Retailers can no longer rely on a single shoplifting event - they must be able to build ironclad, automated digital case files that prove cumulative, organised, and aggravated behaviour over time,” added Nicholls.
This behaviour will only change if offenders see a consequence of their actions which is where there is a need to harness and share data from what Fujitsu refers to as ‘under-utilised legacy assets.’
Retailers are sitting on goldmines of under-utilised infrastructure,” he said.
“From local Business Crime Reduction Partnerships (BCRPs) to local authority security officers and town-centre wardens - the human assets exist, but they are completely disconnected from the store's real-time environment.
We need to be able to move from passive monitoring to automated notification recording and reporting.
Imagine your in-store threat detection system identifying a prolific offender at the entrance and instantly sending a rich-data push notification to a nearby BCRP warden or roaming guard's smart device. This introduces new ways of working where response happens during the crime, not twenty minutes after,” he said.
By automating the detection of known high-harm offenders or erratic behaviour, staff receive early warnings, allowing for safe, non-confrontational deterrence such as automated public view monitoring overrides or smart gate closures, for example.
The expert articles over the next few issues will explore behaviours and how they might change as well as how such an approach would work to maximising ROI.
The overall objective of the ongoing debate is to provide the road map to how to utilise a new AI overlay to join up thinking and ‘sweat the assets’ of the existing technology to generate increased value from security investments and build a more effective and responsive security eco-system.
The data generated will help provide stores with better situational awareness of what is happening in stores and when. These new data points when combined with external intelligence can provide the level of threat/risk for a store in real time.
Fujitsu wants to work collaboratively with industry partners to make the transition to a connected security eco-system simple for customers and provide wider opportunities for partners to innovate.
David Nicholls added: “This is a real debate and opportunity to highlight how automation links a retailer’s existing CCTV, their communications, their reporting portals such as like Opal, and their guard routing into a single workflow. This is designed to protect profits by preventing the loss before it walks out the door, finally reversing the crime curve.”
In the following articles we will exploring the issues in more detail including a focus upon criminal behaviours and those operating with impunity, operational guidelines in and outside the stores, police responses - now and in the future - and exactly how the AI overlay will work in practice to join up and ‘sweat existing assets’.
For more information about Fujitsu UK, David Nicholls can be contacted here.
