The Banking (Glossary) segment again performed very well in the fiscal year under review. Net sales increased by 15% to €1,358 million (2005/2006: €1,178 million). We succeeded in generating forward momentum in both our Product and Software/Services business. As a result of growth in net sales and strict cost management, EBITA (Glossary) in the Banking segment climbed 18% to €142 million (2005/2006: €120 million). The EBITA margin moved up 0.3 percentage points to 10.5% (2005/2006: 10.2%).
Net Sales and EBITA History: Banking. €m
The excellent performance of this segment was partly due to the successful expansion of our entire portfolio. We see the main function of our hardware, software and services as being that of assuring the constant optimization of a bank’s branch processes. This includes, for example:
- migrating bank processes to self-service solutions ranging from simple mono-functional systems to high-end solutions, such as combined deposit and dispensing (recycling),
- process automation,
- the efficient ongoing development of all cash-related transactions,
- the modification of sales processes and account-related procedures,
- ensuring the security of IT installations and branches,
- the merging of and interaction between different sales channels
(multichannel (Glossary) ) and the associated standardization of IT infrastructures, - optimization of the cost-benefit ratio throughout the lifetime of the installations (Total Cost of Ownership) (Glossary) ,
- ensuring the cost-efficient operation and reliability of IT systems.
During the year under review, we again expanded our solutions portfolio in a range of key areas:
Customer-process-oriented software.
This helps to improve bank services and sales opportunities at the customer-bank interface (self-service and branch), as well as driving forward the process of standardizing IT infrastructures. In parallel, process-oriented software helps to reduce the total cost of ownership for our customers. This type of software is based on the net-centric principle of service-oriented architectures (SOA (Glossary) ), which offers process-tracking functions on a central server that can be used across all the bank’s sales channels linked to the system. This, in turn, provides a solid basis for the smooth and transparent management and synchronization of customer processes.
Security of self-service systems (Glossary) and IT networks.
Together with a number of our partners, we cover a wide spectrum of security requirements – from computer hardware and IT systems through to buildings. The emphasis lies on the intelligent combination of base technologies.
Solutions for the monitoring and control of self-service systems.
These allow us to determine the operational status of all systems in the networks at any time. They involve tasks such as reporting on technical operating conditions and monitoring processes, as well as assuming responsibility for the running of entire systems. Our solutions boost availability rates for those systems by a significant margin. A further award bestowed on one of our customers by a highly respected British banking (Glossary) magazine clearly shows the extent to which our innovatory drive has been acknowledged within this area. “The Banker” presented an award to a Malaysian-based bank that uses our monitoring software.
