Worldline - 2019 Universal Registration Document

D

EXTRA-FINANCIAL STATEMENT OF PERFORMANCE Building customer trust with reliable, secured, innovative and sustainable solutions

Our innovation management D.2.2.2

Worldline’s approach to innovation D.2.2.2.1 [WL2] [WL8] Worldline has a twofold approach to innovation: Incremental: part of the innovations developed by ● Worldline improves the existing services and processes designed for its customers on a daily basis. the climate of trust and proximity established with its customers also reinforces Worldline's value creation by allowing a better understanding of their needs and issues. Worldline's presence in multiple markets is a valuable asset that enables it to offer its solutions in new markets based on feedback from elsewhere. the evolution of Worldline's offering in the telecommunications sector illustrates this incremental approach: basic webmail services are evolving towards a more advanced and innovative offering of multi-channel solutions based on the consumer cloud and using convergent messaging technology; Disruptive: in parallel, Worldline is also focusing its ● research, development & innovation efforts on proactively developing disruptive technologies that provide solutions to its customers' current and future problems with an innovative perspective and angle. The Group adapts and markets its innovations to its customers through innovation workshops, “proof-of-concept” and other means to promote their usefulness. examples of breakthrough innovation processes that have emerged from this strategy include the early development of blockchain technology. the company brought together its experts and engineers around a working group, whose main objectives were to train teams in this technology, share information, conduct market research, and sound out customer interest and pool work and development. the first achievements of this new approach were the adaptation of Worldline's payment solutions (sips online payment platforms and terminals) to enable the physical use of crypto-money. Many of Worldline’s Research, Development & Innovation engineers are closely integrated within Worldline’s operational teams and focus primarily on incremental innovation, while other engineers are focused on longer-term projects dedicated to disruptive innovation. Within Worldline, 38% of Research, Development & Innovation department employees are PhDs and PhD students [WL2].

In 2019, the Research, Development & Innovation expenditures have been €97.6 million (for more information, please refer to this present document, Section C). Innovation management in Worldline consists in promoting, stimulating, facilitating and valorizing innovation, which requires the development of a strong culture of innovation. By communicating on innovation as a company value, by providing examples of innovations and by highlighting positive behaviors as well as success stories, Worldline ensures that all employees can understand what innovation is, how important it is and that everyone is concerned, and stimulates it in many ways: Top-down, by leveraging trends and monitoring ● competitive intelligence; Bottom-up, by calling to the creativity of each employee; ● Laterally, through interactions with its market, industrial ● and academic ecosystems. Worldline facilitates innovation by providing tools, training, processes, communities and initiatives. For example, Worldline’s idea incubation program helps innovators define, refine, explore, develop and grow their ideas to the point they can be adopted as part of mainstream processes. Valorization is primarily done by integrating innovations into Worldline’s offerings portfolio, but also through patents and know-how. As part of its Innovation management, Worldline conveys amongst the key following messages: An inclusive definition of innovation so that everyone feels ● concerned and able to innovate and understands that innovation is not just about technology, but also products, services, processes, organization, marketing, sales, business models, as well as social aspects; The importance of ambidexterity: the Company must be ● capable of simultaneously exploiting current sources of revenue, while exploring new opportunities that will become the revenue of tomorrow. Keeping a good balance between exploration and exploitation is therefore essential; Innovation is a process (search/select/implement/capture) ● that needs to be structured, monitored and aligned to a strategic agenda; Innovation being tightly bound to knowledge, experience ● and learning , these forms of return need to be taken into account for the evaluation of innovative projects.

104

Universal Registration Document 2019