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In 2014, Wincor World revolves around the customer

Europe's ATM giant is ready to implement its ambitious global growth strategy customer by customer, answer by answer.

January 22, 2014 by Suzanne Cluckey — Owner, Suzanne Cluckey Communications

Wincor World got off to a big, busy start on Tuesday, welcoming crowds of Wincor Nixdorf banking and retail customers and partners from more than 90 countries to a teeming A2 Forum in Rheda-Wiedenbrück, Germany.

With its choice of an opening keynote, the ATM giant put the message plainly: It is all about the end customer. Barnaby Davis, managing director of Barclays U.K. branch networks focused his presentation on banking services built around customer needs, or "you-shaped banking."

"The world's changing incredibly quickly," Davis said. "And I think it's less about trying to predict what's going to happen to branch banking in the next two to five years. It's much more about what technology is doing to disrupt the way people have done things for hundreds of years and how can you move with the highest level of agility to anticipate that customer's needs — to make it incredibly easy for customers to do things and remain relevant to them."

In his opening remarks, Wincor Nixdorf president and CEO Eckhard Heidloff expanded on the theme of customer-driven banking:

We have to put our thinking on a broader basis. It's not just a matter of issuing money through an ATM — which used to be a tremendous achievement, but they [still] look like 30 years ago. The process of change leads to a situation where you've got to make combinations with the new media. For example, why not start the transaction with the smartphone and conclude it with the ATM? ... 

And it's not so much IT that is going to determine the speed. The speed will be determined by the customers, by the needs of the customers ... IT will have to follow and follow quickly.

That Wincor Nixdorf is now in a market position where it can turn its keenest focus to the customer was made plain in a press conference on the opening afternoon. At an investor meeting on Monday, Heidloff said, the company announced results from its first fiscal quarter of 2013–2014, which indicated what the company called "a return to growth in dynamic markets."

Among those dynamics: 

• a doubling of the world's middle class — to 4.2 billion people — in the next 15 years;
• cash stocks that are growing at a rate of 6 percent in industrialized countries and even more in growth markets; 
• cash use in 9 out of 10 transactions worldwide;
• an increase  of 6 percent annually in the number of ATMs worldwide — from 2.6 million to day to 3.7 million in 2018;
• an increase of 9 percent annually in the number of cash withdrawals globally — from 81 billion to 133 billion in 2018; and finally,
• the ubiquitous availability to consumers of intelligence and information.

Heidloff said that to capture this growth potential, Wincor Nixdorf will focus on market trends in retail banking that include differentiation of customer eperience; increasing efficiency while reducing costs; uniting customer experience and productivity through branch transformation; and the accommodation of the power shift from bank to consumer.

For each of these categories, visitors to Wincor World would have the opportunity to see implemented solutions in the A2 Forum's exhibit hall:

easily implemented state-of-the-art user interfaces for a convenient and intuitive user experience at the ATM, and seamless alignment between channels;

ATM management and self-service outsourcing to ensure the highest availablility at all times, and to optimize business processes and cost savings;

a tablet-based assisted teller solution that helps staff anticipate the needs of self-service customers and engage in helpful and meaningful customer interaction; and

the assisted self-service devices themselves, which can efficiently bridge "the apparent contradiction of cost reduction and customer service."

During the press conference, ATM Marketplace asked how Wincor Nixdorf could effectively cover a worldwide market shaped by a vast and varied range of trends and highly specific regional needs. Heidloff had a ready response:

The Germans, we love complexity, and therefore, it's possible [for us] to cover to cover the whole range quite well ...

I think that we have defined the modularity, which means very stable modules developed by ourselves, with a very great depth of development to run reliably and stably.This is packaged individually for whatever is required — a supply chain in Asia for the Asian markets; in Brazil for Brazil; in Germany for Europe — identifying what fits and does not fit ... and listening to customers.

... What we see when we look at the branch transformation theme is the willingness on the part of customers to experiment, to see what they need, how things can be packaged. And here, we believe with our flexibility, our very good developer structure, we are able to give good answers.

Customers will be hoping to find those answers this week among some 500 exhibits, 70 presentations, 45 business partners — and, of course, Wincor Nixdorf itself — at Wincor World.

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photo: woodleywonderworks

About Suzanne Cluckey

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Suzanne’s editorial career has spanned three decades and encompassed all B2B and B2C communications formats. Her award-winning work has appeared in trade and consumer media in the United States and internationally.