Re: Financial supersite
There is fierce competition in the online brokerage area to dominate this space. Schwab has 3M and E-trade has 2M accounts. NDB may be currently profitable but if they don't get the scale, they will be lost.
It can be expected that in coming months fees for trades go down to close to the marginal cost of a trade. Then you need scale to be able to compete, otherwise you go broke.
Customers of brokers still accept some outages. But soon they require a minimum level of service and quality. To deliver this quality, sites need more or less the same amount of systems and investments. If you have 500K of customers or 2M customers, basic cost are the same, but you can divide it by more customers and more trades.
So again it is scale which defines the competition.
Today a full-service online broker has to deliver two types of services:
A. Full range of financial information, quotes, portfolio tracking, news, charts
B. Account management and trade execution.
If the agreement SI-NDB means that SI delivers A and NDB delivers B, the result would mean larger scale for both.
NDB can leave the financial information to SI and concentrate on the money and the transactions.
What happens if NDB is able to reduce it's prices to US$ 10 a trade, while delivering all the information of SI, would you change?
If E*Trade is now able to charge US$ 4,95 to frequent traders, this means that within a year all trades will be lower than this level. Brokerage will become a commodity. A dial tone. Then information services will make the difference.
I think it is tremendous good news. They tried to get a trading alliance before with Datek, but their links seem to be removed.
Prepare to get even less coverage, because with this move GNET gets against the traditional brokers. Competition of GNET now includes Merrill, E-Trade and Schwab.
Next moves may include an online bank and online bill payment.
I don't believe we will see IPO's out of GNET. I hope not.
Regards,
Pareto |
