RBC Direct Investing
A review of 2014 at RBC Direct Investing
Our move to $9.95 trades for all
As the year began we made the market-leading move to $9.95 trades for all – we felt the time was right for us to be the one creating this change within the industry and our team was very excited to be leading this change.
We wanted to accomplish two things: to make online investing more easily accessible by making it more affordable; and to make our pricing available to all, by removing barriers for investors with smaller balances, who often couldn’t benefit from lower pricing due to minimum asset size and/or trading frequency. Our move to $9.95 flat commission pricing for all online and mobile equity trades accomplished both those goals. Now, regardless of how many trades an online investor makes or the size of an investor’s account, our price is $9.95. This is complemented by our existing $6.95 flat commission for active investors who make more than 150 trades per quarter.
Our social media Community
We soft-launched our online Community site in 2013 as a secure online meeting space for our clients to discuss all aspects of self-directed investing. This past year, we began actively promoting the Community — this included a national contest, which succeeded in increasing our Community membership to more than 12,000 members. Through Community, members connect with like-minded investors to exchange ideas, obtain opinions about their investments and learn from each other – all via anonymous user names. This anonymity enables Community members to compare their holdings (in percentage values only) to those with similar goals, time horizons and appetite for risk and to ask questions of “investors like me.”
Within the Universe section – a unique feature of this social media site – members can actually see what other investors are holding in their portfolios (in percentages only, as no actual dollar amounts are disclosed) and can ask questions about those holdings. Within the Forums section, members have conversations with each other and gain the opportunity to learn from other members’ online investing experiences.
What continues to excite us about Community is that we’re able to see the impact this peer-to-peer information sharing site is having on investors’ confidence as they discuss where to start and what to buy with other investors. We know that the more engaged you are as an online investor, the more active you are in the channel. Community is helping investors to stay engaged in the investment process – the encouragement Community members give to each other, the vast amount of ideas they are sharing, is great to see.
More choice for Series D mutual funds
We’ve been happy to see other firms moving to offer low-cost Series D mutual funds – including Purpose Investments and BMO. This was one of our key objectives, bringing even greater choice and value by offering mutual funds with channel-appropriate pricing to reward self-directed investors who do their own research and want to invest in actively managed funds. We’re awaiting next steps from Manulife to make Series D mutual funds available across multiple channels and we look forward to others offering Series D in future.
A preview of 2015
Beta launches, client feedback
When we recently modernized our Trading Dashboard, we launched our changes in Beta – we plan to use this same Beta approach for some of the changes we are planning for 2015. Beta gives us the opportunity to do a soft launch to clients and obtain their feedback before we fully turn anything on.
Our next soft launch will be enhancements to our My Portfolios tab. As to other enhancements we have in mind for the rest of 2015, “stay tuned” – and we’ll be very happy to go into further details as each one is officially launched.
What I can tell you is that we will continue to provide our clients with an extensive array of tools and educational resources to help them gain the confidence they need to manage their own investments, in addition to providing them with a wide range of choices on our product shelves.
Michael MacDonald
Vice-President – Strategy
RBC Direct Investing
To learn more about RBC Direct Investing, visit their website at www.rbcdirectinvesting.com or view our profile of RBC Direct Investing here.
You missed Qtrade
Thanks for your comment Amanda. Qtrade was invited to participate but was unable to submit a response by the publication deadline.