Bell Direct has boosted its online broking service following a rush of registrations from former Sanford Securities and Avocol Stockbroking clients.
“When the migration was happening…we were having registrations of hundreds of clients per day and the majority were from Sanford or Avocol,” Bell Direct chief operating officer Lee Muco said.
“There are a lot of familiar names – names that I’ve dealt with in the past when I worked with Sanford. We’ve had a lot of good feedback from those clients.”
Late last year the Commonwealth Bank of Australia bought wealth management and broking group IWL, including Sanford and Avocol.
More than 60,000 Sanford and Avocol clients were asked to select a new broker.
As a result Bell Direct has made a number of enhancements to its business to meet the needs of its clients.
In what Bell Direct is calling an Australian first, investors can now buy and sell stock directly by sending a text message from their mobile phone.
The SMS share trading, launched yesterday, will cost 55 cents per SMS. Bell Direct’s existing online brokerage price is $15 per trade.
“We’ll definitely do something with the mobile internet space but we decided that it really only serves the people with the high end PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] style phones and we wanted to offer something that everyone can use,” he said.
Bell Direct intends to release further enhancements in a few weeks.
“In the last four weeks we’ve done four system releases, which were all about providing enhancements to the website in response to feedback.”
Muco would not be drawn on how many former Sanford Securities and Avocol Stockingbroking clients have joined Bell Direct.
