Siemens Financial Services and GlobalTrade Corporation have announced that they have signed a strategic alliance agreement to work together towards the goal of connecting all banks that provide trade services to Siemens Germany electronically via the internet.

“Currently about 75% of our banks can provide us with documentary credit messages electronically, but remaining 25% still send faxes or originals by registered mail. This is a great inconvenience to Siemens and to other exporters in Germany,” says Gerhard Heubeck, team head of documentary business, at Siemens Financial Services GmbH.   “@GlobalTrade Swift/DTAEA Converter & eLC Delivery System developed by GlobalTrade Corporation not only solves this problem of electronic delivery but also provides messages to us in a richer data format that is easily imported into our own accounting system.”

Jacob Katsman, CEO of GlobalTrade says that corporates do not want to sign up to proprietary bank systems since this is not practical even with two or three banking relationships. In case of large corporates that have 20 to 40 banking relationships this is certainly not workable.

“Our company has built a multi-bank system based on requirements of large and midsize corporates and designed it in a way that banks could connect without necessarily integrating our system with their back office. Now even small banks or branches of foreign banks can participate and meet the demands of their corporate clients,” adds Katsman.

Heubeck admits that it took several years to get the main German banks to agree to a standard for electronic message delivery and now this is a reality. “We hope that this alliance will lead the way of getting 100% of the banks connected to the industry,” says Heubeck.

Swift/DTAEA Converter & eLC Delivery System is part of @GlobalTrade Platform that offers document preparation and collaboration functionality to help credit departments share information with their factories, logistics departments, sales departments and third parties.