Sydney, February 26: Bell Direct today launched this country's first ever SMS share trading service.
From today, Bell Direct customers will be able to enjoy the convenience of buying and selling shares on their mobile phone via a simple SMS transaction that is easy, quick and secure.
Chief Operating Officer, Lee Muco, said Bell Direct's introduction of SMS share trading into Australia provided investors with a new level of convenient and fast access to the share market by using their most familiar accessory – the mobile phone.
"As long as investors have their mobile phone handy, Bell Direct SMS share trading enables them to buy and sell shares if they are away from their computer, for example picking up the kids from school, shopping, watching the TV, even whilst in a board meeting!" Mr Muco said.
Buying or selling via the new SMS service is a straightforward process in which customers text message their order to Bell Direct in a simple buy/sell-stock codequantity- price format.
Almost instantaneously they receive a response from Bell Direct asking for confirmation of the order, which, if correct, is then sent back with a hash-encoded time-stamp unique to that order.
A time-out, failsafe mechanism has also been built into the process so that if a customer does not confirm the order within five minutes – due for instance to loss of network coverage – that order is automatically cancelled and must be placed again.
Mr Muco said that whilst Australian investors have previously been able to trade shares via mobile phones, they have had to do so by using WAP internet access, which, compared to using SMS, is cumbersome, complicated and can be expensive.
"Accessing the internet on your phone is still nowhere near as fast and easy as sending an SMS, and of course everybody is familiar with how to use SMS," Mr Muco said.
"There is also the cost issue because using your phone's browser can carry all sorts of hidden data usage costs."
Bell Direct customers using SMS share trading will pay a fixed cost of only 55 cents per SMS, while they will also benefit from Bell Direct's market-beating online brokerage pricing of just $15 per trade.
Although brand new to Australia, SMS share trading is already extremely popular in South East Asian markets such as China, Malaysia and South Korea. According to a recent report by US firm Research & Markets, at the end of 2007 there were 1.48 million mobile stock traders in China, a figure forecast to rise to 2.58 million by the end of 2008.
Mr Muco said Bell Direct was confident that its SMS share trading facility would also be enthusiastically taken up by Australian investors.
"Australians are increasingly comfortable with SMS as a channel for financial transactions, and with the major banks introducing SMS banking, SMS share trading is a logical and exciting innovation for Bell Direct to introduce," Mr Muco said.
Bell Direct was launched in November last year and is the first new online share trading platform to begin operating in Australia in a decade. The company is partowned by Bell Financial which listed on the ASX in December last year.
The Executive Chairman and principal architect of Bell Direct is Steven Goh, a true innovator in the online share trading industry. Mr Goh created Australia's first online stockbroker, Sanford Securities, in 1997.
Mr Goh said that cutting-edge, proprietary technology developed from the ground up and designed to enhance the customer experience was at the core of Bell Direct.
"Our SMS share trading service is an example of how our completely new trading platform is flexible enough to meet the demands of today's investor for ever-more innovative and convenient products," Mr Goh said.
"In technological terms and in the service we offer our customers we are streets ahead of our competitors, and SMS share trading is just the first of a raft of exciting innovations Bell Direct will be bringing to the Australian investment community this year," he said.