CWHK: Your company prides itself on spending a high proportion of revenue on R&D. But does that R&D budget impact your marketing efforts?

Jim Goodnight: We spend about US$20 million annually on marketing globally. We have about 50 [marketing] staff who are pragmatic marketing people. They find out where customers want us to go with our product. We treat our customers as our shareholders, because they're paying us every year to add features they want.

CWHK: You're heavily involved in the financial sector in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and said that one of the features you provide is protection against fraud.

JG: The way we set up our anti-fraud features involves a combination of heuristic and modeling techniques. The models work best on past historical records-that is, the client indicates which transactions have been fraudulent and we predict the probability of future transactions being frauds on a 0-100 [percentage] basis. They then set a threshold and anything far above that would be cut off [as fraud] while transactions which are closer to the threshold would be examined by staff.

CWHK: You also mentioned anti-money laundering features.