Siemens and GlobalTrade Partner To Bring Banks Online

ERLANGEN Germany & TORONTO Canada, October 4, 2004 – Siemens Financial Services GmbH and GlobalTrade Corporation have announced today 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 per cent of our banks can provide us with documentary credit messages electronically, but remaining 25 per cent still send faxes or originals by registered mail. This is a great inconvenience to Siemens and to other exporters in Germany, said Gerhard Heubeck Team Head of Documentary Business of 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,” added Heubeck.

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,” added Katsman.

Heubeck admits that it took several years to get the main German banks 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 per cent of the banks connected to the industry, said 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.

About Siemens Financial Services GmbH

With about 1,500 employees and an international network of financing companies coordinated by Siemens Financial Services GmbH, Munich, Siemens Financial Services (SFS) offers a broad range of financial solutions. This covers services from sales and investment financing to treasury services, fund management and insurance brokerage. Key customers of our companies are internationally active industrial and services companies as well as public-sector operators. For further information about SFS see www.sfs.siemens.com.

About GlobalTrade Corporation

GlobalTrade Corporation (GTC) designs, develops and manages innovative, collaborative products and services for global trade services. The Company services producers and traders that require multi-bank information exchange and document management systems for handling risk exposure and clean document creation, and financial institutions that require secure electronic data exchange with their corporate customers. @GlobalTrade™ is a registered trademark of GTC.

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