The strength of our market presence is largely determined by our ability to innovate. It is for this reason that we now employ around one tenth of our headcount in Research and Development (R&D). Every year, we invest roughly 4.5% of net sales in R&D projects.

We intend to maintain a high level of spending on R&D and to keep expanding continously our activities in this field.

Our development work is focused particularly on:

• further advances in the convergent base technologies that can be used as components for the optimization of both banking and retail processes
• improvements to the serviceability (Glossary)  of our hardware and software to reduce the cost to customers of running our solutions (Glossary) 
• software as the key to improving the overall process chains that characterize the branch operations of retail banks and retailers