For time immemorial, we have been shaped by interpersonal relationships and the urge to seek out the new and unknown: trade, commerce and communication have played a pivotal role for mankind over the millennia. In the process, humans left their familiar surroundings and, driven by curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, ventured out to the four corners of the world on journeys of discovery.

So by no means is globalisation a new phenomenon, and it is certainly not just an invention of the Europeans. Its roots are to be found in the centuries-old avenues for buying, selling and communicating that have stretched since antiquity across the Mediterranean region, Africa and the Middle East, all the way to India, China and ultimately North and South America.

The creative leitmotif of our 2012 annual report is: “on the move”. By highlighting the key trade routes of the past four thousand years, it illustrates the dynamic force and flow that has always carried humanity to new horizons.

The rendering of banking services has forever gone hand-in-hand with this evolution of trade and communication. And the means and modes of payment along these routes have been constantly refined.

VP Bank itself is also “on the move” by discovering new products, new advisory approaches, new markets – and above all, new contacts to people and new clients. A passion for the new plays the most important role in VP Bank’s way of exchanging ideas and communicating. So navigate with us through the various passages of this annual report and get to know more about VP Bank.

Today’s information and communication landscape is crisscrossed by a bevy of paths that help to channel the daily exchange of information and make its dissemination more efficient. The classical media family of radio and television has grown to include the Internet and mobile telephony. Now the challenge is to heighten the efficiency of that communication and the transfer of data.

However, along with the myriad communication possibilities that have become everyday tools since the ‘90s comes the time it takes for people to actually communicate. Today, international commerce has a lot to do also with the selling and exchange of data.

The quantity of data generated globally is growing exponentially. Every two years, it doubles. As a result, the 1.8 zettabyte mark was reached in 2012 – meaning that an amount equivalent to 1.8 trillion gigabytes of data was added to the existing worldwide store of information. That seemingly absurd zettabyte figure can be visualised by imagining 20 stacks of books that extend from Earth to the planet Neptune. And this relentless increase in data is being driven by constantly improved technology and declining investment costs.

Despite numerous attempts to do so, the true magnitude of the global inventory of data is difficult to assess. Not all of the generated bits and bytes are actually stored, thus many data have a lifespan of mere seconds before they are deleted.

Accordingly, this torrid pace of growth in the amount of data, data transfers and data storage requirements also calls for infrastructural reorientation. The issues surrounding an efficient, long-term means of archiving the information are just one aspect. There is also an increasing need for lightning-fast search algorithms that make it even possible to ferret out the desired information from such a gigantic hoard of data. Realtime services such as Twitter and Facebook pose extreme challenges for the existing storage architecture of those systems, the new concepts for storage, as well as the database systems themselves. Technological evolution in this area is not even close to its end.