As cross-border pooling grows in popularity, corporates are demanding faster, more efficient solutions from their banks.

ING's award winning intraday cash balancing facility has distinct advantages over traditional end-of-day balancing arrangements. By offering greater investment opportunities, reducing costs and offering, in the Netherlands, an attractive location for a cross-border cash pool, ING has gone some way towards satisfying this demand.

The purpose of this article is to examine the changing nature of 'cash balancing' or 'sweeping' and the advantages of the emergent intraday, as opposed to the traditional end-of-day, approach with special consideration to the favourable conditions within the Netherlands.

First of all, however, it's important to establish what we mean by the term 'cash balancing'. Most companies and institutions may refer to it as 'sweeping', but cash balancing can also be used to cover 'target balancing' or 'trigger balancing'. For the purposes of this article therefore, we shall refer to it as cash balancing.

Whatever term you use, this is the process by which a corporate 'sweeps' the balances from his subsidiary and participating companies into the master account.