The global custody business may not have been at the forefront of investors' minds when JP Morgan and Chase Manhattan began their courtship last year.

Nonetheless, the bank hopes it is another business that the merger will benefit by expanding its product line and geographic reach.

"We are certainly a long-standing player, and one that has been truly global for a many, many years," says Tom Swayne, executive vice president of JP Morgan Investor Services (JPMIS). "The merger with JP Morgan gives us an even better product footprint."

Chase was a behemoth in the custody business long before JP Morgan came calling. With its international heritage, the bank's custody arm distinguished itself in the 1970s as the investment business went global.

It is something that continues today. Of the $6,000bn in assets the newly-formed JPMIS has under custody, $2,300bn are global.

JP Morgan should add to those capabilities. Its Jardine Flemings unit has a strong presence in Asia that will help the bank to clear business faster and more efficiently in those markets.

Other benefits from the merger may be less tangible, but they could prove as powerful. As with the other units of the bank, the custody department hopes to reap the benefits of being in a much larger, and more diversified financial services company.

The idea is that customers who have traditionally spread business across a number of specialist banks will increasingly look to the combined entity as a one-stop shop.

For instance, a mutual fund company that trades stocks and bonds through JP Morgan may now be persuaded to bring their custody business to the enlarged bank.

That all-encompassing customer relationship is something that JPMIS is seeking to replicate within the custody division.

Rather than merely holding and tracking customer assets, it is offering a range of ever-more sophisticated services tailored to individual clients' needs. JPMIS, for instance, allows clients to compare the efficiency of their brokers at clearing trades, or to understand better the risks, or to keep abreast of the impact of the latest financial regulations in, say, Korea.

The changes are a result of the revolution in information technology, which is allowing custodians to gather and process reams of data from fund managers and then beam it back to them in a variety of ways.

"This is a piece of the financial services industry that is undergoing massive change. More change has occurred in the last five years than the previous 50 years," says Diane Eshleman, chief operating officer at JPMIS. "Big institutional investors expect their custodian to be proactive and notify them when there's an area where they can improve their performance."

These ideas have been expressed in a new asset managers solutions group, whose mandate is to focus on customers' back and middle-office trading and technology needs so that they can focus on investing.

How the merger will play out for JPMIS is a matter of debate. Some competitors claim that a broad financial supermarket will not bolster the global custody group, but drown it out.

They argue that the demand for capital from other parts of the group, such as investment and commercial banking, will cause global custody to become lost in the mix.

That, of course, remains to be seen. In the meantime, the first order of business for JPMIS may be winning over the JP Morgan asset management group as a client.

It signed up Bank of New York, one of Chase's biggest custody rivals, after JP Morgan left the business in the 1990s.

JPMIS' executives insist they are separated from their asset management brethren by an internal firewall. But one can bet that the asset management group will be re-examining those contracts as soon as they expire.