Undervalued stocks...aisle 3.
Wal-Mart, ShareBuilder Set
Deal to Offer Investing Services
By KRIS HUDSON
May 19, 2007; Page A6
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has teamed with discount brokerage ShareBuilder Corp. to offer low-cost investment services, marking the retailer's initial expansion of its financial-services offerings since abandoning its bid to start an industrial bank.
Bellevue, Wash.-based ShareBuilder won't share revenue from the service with Wal-Mart because of securities regulations prohibiting such arrangements, said Jeff Seely, ShareBuilder's chairman and chief executive. Wal-Mart introduced the service, titled Wal-Mart Easy Investing by ShareBuilder, early this month with a link on its Web site. It soon will begin promoting the service in its U.S. stores, too.
ShareBuilder's Wal-Mart service differs little from its standard offerings, with lower prices in a few instances if a client anticipates making only a handful of predetermined stock trades each month. Those costs range from $4 for one, preset transaction per month to a package of 20 trades per month for $20, with extra trades costing $2 each. ShareBuilder doesn't charge a fee for money-market deposits.
Wal-Mart, Bentonville, Ark., announced in March when it dropped its industrial-bank bid that it instead would aggressively expand its financial-services business, which already includes selling money orders, bill payment and check-cashing services. A Wal-Mart spokesman described the retailer's ShareBuilder service as a pilot project. |
