Competition for the retail investor dollar heats up as online brokers pull out all the stops to capture a bigger slice of the pie. — The Straits Times
SINGAPORE: Online brokerages and share trading platforms are slashing fees and offering a range of perks to attract customers amid intense competition in the sector.
The battle for clients kicked off in earnest when Xiaomi-backed Tiger Brokers entered the market in 2020, followed by Tencent-backed Moomoo Financial in 2021, and has only heightened since.
Lower trading costs are one aspect of the fight to attract and retain customers.
Saxo Bank, a Danish bank with an online trading platform, fired the latest salvo in the fees and commissions war when it announced on March 4 that it will cut overall trading costs and remove the monthly fees that clients were paying for certain account plans.
The move will see monthly fees being slashed by as much as S$145 to zero.
At the same time, the commissions for trading European and Asian stocks (including Singapore stocks) have been cut to between 0.03% and 0.08% of the trade value, from between 0.1% and 0.15% respectively.
Minimum commission fees for trading United States stocks have also been cut by 50% to US$1 (S$1.35), while the minimum fees for trading Singapore securities are S$3.
Adam Reynolds, Asia-Pacific chief executive of Saxo, said that Saxo is cutting the foreign exchange conversion costs for clients who invest outside of their home currency by 0.5 percentage points to 0.25%.
He said the bank can make “quite an aggressive reduction in prices” because it uses the same trading platform across all of its markets and can spread its fixed costs over 14 different offices.
The competitive retail investing market in Singapore saw its first major casualty when TD Ameritrade decided to bow out from the space in December 2023. — The Straits Times/ANN
