The future of banking at HP Innovation Day

HP Labs is the research arm of the company, with facilities around the world. In Western Europe, the labs are in Bristol but there are others in Israel and Russia and the company's headquarters in Palo Alto, California. On Tuesday, the company brought its HP Labs roadshow to London, where around 150 people went to see what it had to offer.

For most people, it may be difficult to see the connection between banking and the movie Shrek, but to HP's financial services experts they are closely connected. Whether it is the number of pixels on a screen or very large financial numbers, the question is: do they add up?

"In truth, we could not see the connection between making a film and making money until one of the producers of [the original] Shrek visited our research labs," explained Ian Brooks, HP's director of research for the financial services industry.

"He looked at our work and asked if we could use our technology to improve the way he made animated films," said Brooks. "We could help to speed up the labour-intensive process of rendering, and that really worked."

According to Brooks, what followed this request was even more surprising. "We found people from the finance community coming back to us, having seen the film, and asking if we could help them in areas like improving the speed with which they could perform spreadsheet operations," he said. "They have very, very big spreadsheets."

HP Labs is dedicated to research into areas such as the economics of IT and printing and imaging. The research that resulted in Shrek began as an experiment in producing and displaying high-quality graphics as quickly as possible. Like any research company, HP Labs does its work partly for the pure research possibilities and partly with an eye for the practical uses to which an idea can be put.

The company has said that it sees innovation days as a way to open up its experience in various areas to potential customers. 

To start with, visitors could take in a display (pictured) explaining the types of services and products on offer. It was a much more relaxed picture than the hi-tech artwork of Shrek.