ACCESSIBLE INVESTING

Thiluxika Krishnarajah: So, basically, an investor can now buy fractions of shares rather than being required to purchase the entire share. This gives clients access to invest in high value stocks that they would otherwise be unable to afford. It also offers the convenience of being able to invest a fixed amount every month regardless of whether the share price goes up or down. If the share price goes up, you receive fewer fractions of the share, if it goes down, you receive more. This is a very efficient way to build wealth.

Jan De Schepper: Another benefit is the diversification. Fractional trading makes it much easier to invest in say 13-15 stocks and be well diversified, regardless of your wealth. Our fractional share solution covers investments in stocks, a large choice of ETFs and even cryptocurrencies so it is possible to have a really well-diversified portfolio.

T.K.: This has been Swissquote’s philosophy since the very beginning of the company and an innovation like fractional share trading is a proof of concept that we are still living our mission. It’s all about empowering our clients, so that they can take the first step into investing and to make it easy for them to then take additional steps. But, of course, this is only one of many initiatives we have to empower our clients.

J. D. S.: It’s something we measure a lot because we are really customer-centric and championing the customer is one of our driving values. The most important metric is the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. Twice a year, we measure how many net promoters we have and whether this metric goes up or down is an important KPI that factors into our remuneration system. We are very proud of our NPS, which continues to go up year after year. We also measure customer care service levels and take action on staffing and our technology solution to address service levels below our standards.

T.K.: We react fast to client requests and to the reviews we receive across increasingly important platforms such as TrustPilot, Play Store and the App Store, and our contact form on our website. We try to get the client on the phone to address what they have raised and convert them to a promoter. The feedback we receive from customers can be very helpful in identifying a pain point we hadn’t thought about that we then jump on to fix it.

T. K.: We had a lot of requests for this feature from customers. Since its launch last year, direct customer feedback on fractional trading is very low, which typically means that it meets the expectations, in other words, no news is good news.

J. D. S.: What we have seen is that the activation rate is really high. In the first three months, we already had more than 40,000 clients who had activated the feature, which is pretty significant and is proof of success. It’s a good start and we continue to see the figure going up.

J. D. S.: Innovation is our main driver and a key to our success. We try to stay ahead of our competitors and provide solutions aligned with evolving customer needs. Swissquote was first with online trading, then with an online trading app, then for trading cryptocurrencies. Now we have a new wave of innovation through AI that is redefining the interaction between the bank and the client and last year we introduced sentiment analysis (see page 28). We will continue to be frontrunners when it comes to defining the customer experience of the future because we continue to treat the customer as our number one priority.