Intranet: Global Custody Link

Boston's State Street Bank, which has assets of $3.8 trillion under custody, has put together a deal with Bridge Information Systems to distribute to the bank's clients a cluster of foreign exchange (forex) trading, settlement, analysis,

back-office reporting and portfolio management tools it calls Global Link.

The idea: Keep and expand the bank's global custody clients by recognizing how information technology is changing the fundamental complexion of the forex market. And as desktop space is hard to come by, the bank has leaped over this hurdle by leveraging Bridge's formidable market share. "The buy side is becoming empowered at a very rapid pace, and the sell side is becoming much less important and will become less and less important, so if it's going to add value, the sell side has to provide intelligent interpretation of market events and data," says Stan Shelton, State Street's evp for global treasury. "The world of the future will be the buy side speaking to the buy side, because they represent the supply and demand for the marketplace," he adds. "The question is: What is the right market mechanism for each market-and each market is different. We're agnostic about that and want to provide as much access as we can in support of our clients."

While the forex business has typically been a seller's market, he says, information technology is changing the equation, the result being, says Shelton, that "it's easier to get to what you need to get to on-line than through a person, which is why all the products on Global Link are meant to provide some sort of multiple access, be it an analysis of multiple markets, or access to multiple counter-parties, or Lattice (one of the Global Link features) which may be accessed by multiple brokers and markets, wrapped in an integrated package."

The on-line research and analysis tools, which allow for animated illustrations of data, are impressive. At a recent presentation in New York, for instance, Shelton called up an animated abstract of regional currency activity in Southeast Asia in early autumn last year, superimposed on an area map. That demonstrated that the problems in the first regional domino to fall, Thailand, were caused by internal Thai activity. Yet, as asserted by the Malaysian prime minster, Mohammed Maranthir, global forex traders had indeed precipitated much of the currency turmoil in the rest of the area.

-reinbach tfn.com

For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
MORE FROM AMERICAN BANKER