Financial services company HSBC has launched into the Australian online broking industry with new financial services site, NetTrader, and a share trading cost it says is the lowest in the business.
At only $28 per trade up to $28,000, the service is being marketed as one of the cheapest in the industry. Director of HSBC InvestDirect Richard Kimber pointed out that NetTrader also offers Straight Through Processing (STP) allowing investors to directly access the market without the need for human intervention.
"Investors are able to obtain real time quotes from ASX entities, warrants and indices, place buy or sell orders with straight through processing to the market, access morning and afternoon market commentary and create meaningful, real time graphs to assist with investment decisions," he said.
Net Trader is an extension of the HSBC's Invest Direct service, which has offered investors a low cost, broker free service for the past 9 months. Since its launch the service has been successful in attracting a large number of committed investors according Kimber.
"InvestDirect is growing well with over 8000 clients and more than $125 million in CHESS (Clearing House Electronic Settlements Subregister) holdings." Kimber noted. "We are well on track to surpass our target of 10,000 customers in the first year of operation,"
Kimber said that the system was completely developed in Australia by the company, in order for it to be scalable with the ongoing needs of the company and its investors.
"We decided that the back end was more important that then front end and we wanted to evolve the system over time and felt that we wouldn't get that with a packaged solution, so we chose to develop the system ourselves."
