Finance innovation

Foreign exchange is a huge business with little use for small-fry trades-awkward when a company only needs, say, a $10 million Hong Kong dollar-to-lire trade to support an export deal. But CoreStates Bank has figured out a way to help its customers, and make themselves money, too. Called Global Cash Manager, it allows the Philadelphia bank's medium-to- large corporate customers to make multi-currency payments through the CoreStates London office. "It's software that sits on top of our multi- accounts service," says Tom Harper, a CoreStates vp. "If you had a multi- currency account with us in London and you had a French account that needed pounds, we could sell your francs and buy pounds over the system."

CoreStates acts as its customers' counterparty and uses the aggregated positions later for its own forex trading.

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