Brokerage firms want to increase trades, but they don’t want to be hard influencers for customers to do so. Technology can play a role to subliminally stimulate trades and encourage a customer to be an active trader while keeping the brokerage firms far from blame. However, brokerage firms need to think beyond the traditional way of doing business, and to modernise their trading platform to do so. Brokerage firms should provide their customers with intelligent solutions to help them trade easier, in a more convenient and efficient manner.

Customer behaviour can be influenced by a number of means without necessarily incurring huge costs. Rather, it can be achieved by just doing things a little differently. Brokerage firms need to capitalise on the request moments.

Trading platforms need to combine financial trading and the best features of social networks and make them available to their users in a fast and easy way

When a customer requests something, information or transaction, it is the instance that she or he is in the “receiving mode”. This is the instance that brokerage firms need to capitalise on to stimulate trades. The information is usually already with the firm. It is only a matter of shaping and presenting it.

For example, when a customer requests the performance chart of a stock, the brokerage firm can, instead of just putting forward the request chart alone, put the requested chart in addition to two more charts for two other stocks that share something with the one requested by the customer. They could be from the same or complementing industry, have the same risk profile or future outlook, or produce the same fundamental ratios on their business.

Additionally, the brokerage firm can display statistics relating to customer behaviour with regards to this stock during the day. Specifically, the number of customers who viewed this stock, or the number of customers who bought it, the number of customers who sold it, and the number of stocks traded by the firm in the day.

Such information gives the customer a sense of relativity. The customer will think, “oh, I am doing what everyone else is doing. I am safe”, or, depending on the customer’s investment attitude, “oh, I am doing what everyone else is doing. There is no money in it”. However, regardless of the sentiment of the customer, behavioural statistics are likely to stimulate trades.

Deciphering the competition
Comparative information is also intriguing for real time customers. “How am I doing compared to others?” is an eternal question in everyone’s mind, all the time. Brokerage firms have plenty of information that can be used to show each customer how they are doing comparatively, without disclosing confidential information.

For example, letting the customer know the percentile they are in with respect to today’s profitability, where do they stand with respect to stock concentration per industry, or how they did this month versus last month in terms of their ranking.

Comparative information is useful not only to know if someone is doing well or not, but also to know if they are with the main trade or not. Investors vary in their appetite and it is important for some to know if they are with the main stream or taking their own path. Changing the media for providing information can contribute to higher chances of receiving information and, therefore, increased trades. People prefer watching to reading.

The trading platform should also allow users to share trading ideas and opportunities socially

Instead of providing research reports to customer mail or email boxes, which usually get skipped, deliver the research in video to their mobiles and laptops. It is the same research. Just have someone read it. Technology is already available to convert text to voice, which is a step that costs little.

Social networks are becoming an integral part in our daily life these days. Trading platforms need to combine financial trading and the best features of social networks and make them available to their users in a fast and easy way. Expressing one’s self is the main human desire driving the prosperity of social media. It is the same in trading. People want to express themselves.

This could mean enabling customers to share wins and losses with a pre-defined group, or those following them on Twitter. It also means enabling customers to state their opinion on a stock from within the system to their chat rooms, Facebook friends or Twitter followers. The key is to provide this ability from within the trading platform itself in order to make the experience seamless.

A smarter trading platform must reshape inter-activity with customers by making it more personal and relevant to them. It should leverage the power of modern technology to drive customer engagement and motivate changes in their trading behaviour. To achieve the required effect, trading platforms should encourage peer pressure and competition for more active trading behaviour.

To further engage customers, the trading platforms should provide a facility to reward best-performing traders for their good performance and allow other users to mimic their trading activities.

Modernising the platforms
Trading platforms today should facilitate toward their users to connect with other traders using the same platform. It should also allow them to view in all trading activities of other traders whom seem interesting to them. The trading platform should also allow users to share trading ideas and opportunities socially. The platforms should transfer the trading experience into a social experience that is more fun and rewarding at the same time.

Another way to encourage an active trading behaviour is by influencing the crowd, which can be achieved by connecting experienced traders with individuals willing to follow them and copy their trading activities. Today social trading is becoming of great interest.

Providing customers with a facility to follow more experienced traders will be an important vehicle to create broker loyalty and increase customers’ trading volumes, especially for non-experienced customers or new to equity trading.

In general, attitudes vary toward trading as an individual or as part of a group based on the trust, given to successful traders within the group. In the Middle East region, social trading will be highly accepted, where many traders are giving special importance on the credibility of a broker or a successful trader than on the brokerage firm itself.

Furthermore, to capture the maximum customer time in anticipation of trades, brokerage firms should bring to their trading platforms everything their customers are interested in. This means messaging from their Facebook account or the incoming stream from selected Twitter accounts they wish to follow in order to make investment decisions. This needs to be done to maintain a single customer experience. The customer should see the incoming content as part of their trading platform.

It should be as easy as ‘Buy 300 stocks on market price’ from within Facebook

Brokerage firms should also inversely develop their trading platforms to receive orders from social media sites, and in plain language. So, for example, the customer can be chatting with their friends on Facebook and decide to place an order. It should be as easy as ‘Buy 300 stocks on market price’ from within Facebook.

All functionality should be fully integrated and provided to the customer as one solution. Today’s users want a simple, clean solution, not a complicated group of mixed applications with the hassle of integration. The whole process, from signing up to follow a successful trader, watching an analyst’s video, or announcing what he is doing on Facebook or Twitter must be straight-forward, easier, more convenient and efficient.

Another way to facilitate encouraging an active customer trading behaviour is to have a multi-channel platform. To allow customer trading on the move, brokerage firms have to provide their services over multiple channels – in branch, on the phone, online, on tablets, and on the mobile. As smartphones and tablets become more compact, convenient and more powerful, the variety has increased tremendously, as has the introduction of devices that support multiple kinds of inputs.

With all these advancements, it is clear that trading platforms have to be more flexible and accommodate more choice for their users.

The idea is to provide a consistent experience to customers across channels, while giving them seamless access to their financial information and services where and when they are needed. The customer should always be in control of which channel he or she feels more convenient to use in a certain moment. For example, as it is nearly impossible for anyone to be in front of the computer screen constantly, customer could begin a transaction using one channel, say on a PC, and close it using a mobile phone while on the move.

TradeNet allows brokerage firms to provide different channels for their customers to interact with their services, providing them with a seamless, pleasant experience. A customer has a single real-time updated view for their information, positions and holdings regardless from which channel is connected.

The suggested way of thinking and some of the ideas resulting from it, might require issues around security and regulations to be resolved, but the aim is to minimise the time and effort between information, decision and action.