Sydney, February 4: Bell Direct has welcomed a legion of former customers of Sanford Securities and Avcol Stockbroking as a result of the ongoing shake-up in the online share trading sector and the recent market turmoil which left a number of online stockbrokers floundering.
Bell Direct, Australia's most innovative and competitively-priced online share trading and wealth creation platform, said today that more than 70% of the new customers it had signed up in the past two weeks were former customers of Sanford or Avcol.
"We have been delighted with the number of new registrations we've received from disgruntled Sanford and Avcol customers. In fact we've even picked up many of CommSec's own clients sick of being taken for granted," said Lee Muco, chief operating officer of Bell Direct.
In early January, the Commonwealth Bank, which late last year took over Sanford and Avcol's owner, IWL Ltd, reversed earlier assurances it had given to all customers of these two businesses that they would not automatically be migrated across to CommSec's online share broking operation.
"Sanford and Avcol customers became CommSec customers on January 29 whether they liked it or not," Mr Muco said. "But we're happy to say that Bell Direct has appealed very strongly to them thanks to the depth of experience within our fantastic team – many of whom were responsible for Sanford's original development - underpinning our new and innovative, customer friendly technology and share trades priced at just $15."
"Through a punchy print advertising campaign and other marketing activities, we've been able to show these traders how Bell Direct offers something refreshing and different from the pack and, as a result, they have joined us in droves," Mr Muco said.
He added that during the stock market's extreme volatility of late, Bell Direct's new trading platform had proven itself admirably, suffering none of the problems encountered by its competitors.
"Whilst we do not have the number of customers of some of our bigger rivals - yet - we nevertheless recorded an unprecedented number of hits on our website during the heaviest trading days," he said.
Last week, Bell Direct's website recorded an increase in both unique visitors and website hits in excess of 200%. And despite record volumes of ASX trade and message loads, the Bell Direct site functioned perfectly throughout – as indeed it was designed to do.
"That's the beauty of our platform, the fact that it operates with the latest technology and has been designed and built from the ground up by our hugely experienced team to scale very easily and deal quite effortlessly with even the most extreme market conditions," Mr Muco said. "We've used smart design to ensure it needs only a fraction of the resources to deal with the same load as compared with competitor platforms."
Bell Direct was launched in November last year. Its technology platform, built utilising the latest, trusted and proven technologies including a Web 2.0 enhanced trading site is the first new online share trading platform to begin operating in Australia in a decade. The company is part-owned by Bell Financial which listed on the ASX in December last year.