News

Wincor World casts light on tech future

February 3, 2004

Opening Day -- Tues., Feb. 3

PADERBORN, Germany -- Wincor World 2004 "Communicating Visions" kicked off today inside the massive Messezentrum Welle exhibition center. The building, squatting beside a two-lane urban street, can easily be mistaken from the curb for the kind of drab warehouse where one might store rotting wood pallets or other goods of nominal value.

Inside, however, several steps beyond the registration counter and areas of other amenities such as free Internet access from Intel, a cloakroom and gussied-up closets that suffice as press rooms, the warehouse takes on a different form, and the show floor glows and hums with technology. Lighting cast in varying shades and intensities of blue and burnt pink reflects from the silver of the technology, and the combined effect is hot-in meanings both literal and figurative.

Is there something new at Wincor World this year? Absolutely. But don't ask Uwe Krause, head of marketing for the company's banking division, whether the show is about innovation.

"Innovation is in the eye of the beholder," Krause says in an interview before the official start of the show. "Cash recycling is innovative in the U.S. now, but has been around in Germany for a long time."

He encourages me to be watchful for several "non-innovations" on display:

Net-centric architecture, a new approach within Wincor World to eliminate issues relating to software standardization.

• CCD machines (cash and check depositing), which will enable users to deposit checks and immediately retrieve cash. The technology will also enable small businesses to make deposits at the device instead of having to wait in line at a teller window; cash-recycling ability can then immediately feed whatever cash is in the deposit to ATM users.
  
• Biometric security devices.
  
• Wincor Nixdorf's new 2100XE all-in-one machine for cash withdrawal, money orders, cash acceptance, bar-code reading, and other needs.

Of course, he says, what is "innovative" now will be the standard in six months.

At the opening press conference, CEO Karl-Heinz Stiller describes the growth of the show from its original attendance of 100 people to more than 7,000 predicted this year. Also encouraging to him are the facts that Wincor's net sales rose 7 percent to €1.4 billion (U.S. $1.7 billion) in fiscal 2002/03, and EBITDA increased 18 percent.

Stiller names several keys for the company's continued growth, including growing the core business of providing self-service and POS solutions, taking advantage of market dilution, moving into new areas like lottery (the company has already placed its lottery kiosks in some Asian countries), continuing to expand globally, and increasing its consultancy activity.

Joachim Pinhammer, head of marketing for Wincor's retail division, says the Store Vision as comprising three main objectives: friendly POS solutions, smart integration of store systems into enterprise systems, and increased store automation that results in improved customer service.

His division is showing RFID developments, Beetle iscan self-checkout machines, and reverse vending devices and for the acceptance of and compensation for recyclables.

Later in the day, the press were treated to dinner and drinks in old farmhouse converted into a sculpture gallery, where the candles and the wine generated a kind of heat in their quaint, delicious old-world way.