The Same Innovative Base Technologies are used by both banks and retailers. In the year under review, for example, we made further advances in the automation and shortening of cash-handling processes in both industries. Together with a bank and an international service station company, for example, we developed a business model that allows the partner bank to make cash received immediately available for disbursement. We also developed new and upgraded hardware and software and created new service models.
Our solutions for both retailers and banks take account of the requirements of the payment card industry (PCI). The standards laid down by the PCI concern issues such as access rights to customer data and the encryption of data transmitted in the course of non-cash payment transactions. As a member of the PCI Council, we ensure that these standards are implemented promptly.
Related image-recognition technologies are now being employed in systems operated by both retail banks and retailers. The know-how we have acquired in this field can be applied to ATMs equipped with an Intelligent Deposit (Glossary) Module (CCDM (Glossary) ) and to self-checkout systems (Glossary) . We improved the processing speed and stability of the CCDM module, which allows customers to enter a mixture of checks and banknotes, giving us a further competitive advantage. In the field of self-checkout (Glossary) systems, we collaborated with a number of research institutes to develop image recognition procedures that can identify individual items.
