Along with other members of the World Trade Centers Association, Atlanta’s World Trade Center downtown will be promoting TradeCard, a newly developed electronic payment service for international business transactions.
Guy Tozzoli, the founder of the World Trade Centers Association, is credited with developing the system, which he thinks eventually will replace conventional paper-based processes such as letters of credit and open accounts.
The World Trade Centers Association is headquartered at the World Trade Center in New York and has more than 300 member-centers in 101 countries.
Emilie Oxel, World Trade Center Atlanta’s membership director, attended a presentation about TradeCard last month in New York during which Mr. Tozzoli said that TradeCard would become “the standard way to trade by 2000.”
She told GlobalFax in a telephone interview that a presentation would be held in Miami in the near future and that the Atlanta center would follow with a similar event soon afterward.
According to Ms. Oxel, TradeCard automates the international trade process by allowing companies to work with desktop applications to electronically create and transmit documents. A sample document may be found at http://www.tradecard.bm
The main innovation of the system is that its central processor automatically compares one set of documents against another, an important aspect of moving goods across borders that traditionally has been carried out by a bank’s trade finance department.
In addition to the World Trade Centers Association, a consortium of strategic backers is marketing and further developing TradeCard including GE Information Services (GEIS), Sedgwick Insurance Ltd. and American Management Systems (AMS).
For more information, call Ms. Oxel at (404) 880-1553; fax, (404) 880-1555.