As a means of reducing their operating costs in the area of IT systems administration and software management, retail banks and retailers are increasingly looking to implement net-centric, thin-client (Glossary)  architectures. They can achieve substantial savings on software distribution and maintenance costs since a large part of the software remains on servers and only a small proportion on user terminals, such as checkout systems (Glossary)  and ATMs. At an early stage, Wincor Nixdorf began developing software for thin-client architectures.

To ensure that process chains can be controlled throughout, we regularly add new specialist banking or retailer-specific modules and functions to the software platforms that we have developed according to this principle. At the beginning of the calendar year, we presented our “road map” for a complete retail banking solution (Glossary)  to clients in the retail banking industry. Along similar lines, we are developing our TP.net retail branch software to permit centralized control of systems and processes above branch level.