Commonwealth Securities
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Commonwealth Securities | |
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| Type | Subsidiary (ASX:CBA) |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Headquarters |  Sydney, Australia |
| Area served | Australia New Zealand |
| Key people | Matthew Comyn, General Manager |
| Website | www.comsec.com.au |
Commonwealth Securities is Australia's largest discount stockbroking firm operated by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, one of Australia's top four banks. The brokerage arm started operations in 1995.
Commonwealth Securities, also known as "CommSec" or "ComSec", has been highly successful as a discount broker attracting many "mums and dads" (retail) investors. It offers a telephone based brokerage service and advisory service, though its Internet trading platform constitutes the vast majority of its business.
CommSec initially offered only Australian equities trades, but has since expanded into derivative products, international equities, managed funds, Self Managed Super Fund administration, Contracts-For-Difference and margin lending. The firm's large retail customer base has also allowed it to successfully market a number of initial public offering (IPO) fund raisings.
While standard CommSec traders use the static website, frequent equities and options traders use one of the realtime trading platforms. CommSecIRESS is a web-based solution developed by Iress Market Technology (ASX:IRE)) and based on the Java runtime environment, while the software, stand-alone platform Professional Trader or ProTrader runs in Microsoft's .NET environment. These platforms combine all the features of the website, while adding more advanced features and streaming live data from the Australian Securities Exchange.
[edit] Mergers and Acquisitions
CommSec has retained and increased its significant marketshare in retail broking through both CBA's acquisition of other banks and its own acquisition of other broking firms. CommSec now performs broking operations for Colonial First State, TD Waterhouse, AOT, Auckland Savings Bank (ASB), and IWL (Westpac Broking, Sanford and Avcol). The addition of IWL gave CommSec significant market share in wholesale broking to compliment its existing retail presence.
