Chase Manhattan Corp. has assembled a comprehensive, global payment processing service that takes over the payment functions of large corporations and other banks.
The service, called PaySource, is the result of a year-long effort to pull together several existing Chase products and services, including Global Money Transfer, Multibank, and Chase Gold. These had been sold separately.
Using PaySource, large corporations and banks, both foreign and domestic, can outsource entire accounts payable operations to the New York- based money-center, Chase officials said.
PaySource, which is run on a Windows-based platform, can also be "white labeled" so other banks can hide the Chase name from their corporate customers.
It is unclear what effect, if any, Chase's pending merger with Chemical Banking Corp. will have on the availability of the service.
Terri Turner Cahill, a vice president and product line manager with Chase, said customers using the service can cut accounts payable expenses as much as "threefold."
"It enables them to manage the payment process more efficiently," Ms. Cahill said. "There's no need for separate management groups for check- printing operations or ACH payments."
Though corporations may hesitate to hand over their entire accounts payable operations, Ms. Cahill said customers achieved greater control over payments using Chase's management information, balance, and transaction activity systems.
Deborah Talbot, executive vice president of Global Payments and Treasury Services, a unit of Chase's Infoserv division, called the integration effort the "final link in the chain of integrated products."
"Chase PaySource is the only single-source payment processing product on the market that can handle payments globally," she said.
The service was unveiled during last week's New York Cash Exchange, the annual conference sponsored by The Treasury Management Association of New York Inc.
Here's how it works: At specified times of the day or week, customers transmit payment instructions to the bank using standard electronic data interchange formats or, if the customer is a bank, formats from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications.
The instructions can be sent from one mainframe computer to another, or they can be sent using Chase's InfoXchange Originator, a five-year-old, PC- based package.
After authenticating the instructions, Chase then executes payments in a medium specified by the customer.
Payment methods include paper checks, domestic and interntional automated clearing house transactions, Fed Wire transfers, the New York Clearing House's Interbank Payment System, and EDI Bank Alliance Network Exchange.
The following products have been integrated into PaySource:
* Global Money Transfer, developed several years ago to allow payment origination from any Chase location in the world.
* Multibank, launched in 1992, which converts payment instructions into Swift formats.
* Chase Gold, an acronym for Global Online Disbursement. Developed earlier this year, it allows banks and corporations to issue, print, and reconcile checks in any currency from any office in the world.
* Local PC service, through Chase Gold, which allows a company to cut individual checks using personal computers.
* ImageAccess, an imaging archive and retrieval system that displays imaged items on screen from Chase archives or CD-ROM.
* MatchPay, the bank's positive pay application to detect fraudulent checks, including non-U.S. dollar items.
Although the service is aimed at corporations with annual sales of $500 million or more, Ms. Cahill said certain middle-market and smaller companies might also benefit. She declined to disclose pricing other than to say it is "competitive."
She said two companies are already using the entire line of PaySource products; several others are using segments.
With the payables side of the payment stream completed, Ms. Cahill said Chase is developing a similar type of service that manages global receivables.
Chase is a prominent player in the payments business in several areas. It is the largest dollar clearer, averaging more than $470 billion daily, and the largest originator of ACH transactions, processing more than 190 million last year.
