By Lisa Burroughes, 4 February 1999 17:02
NEWS Online stockbroker Charles Schwab claims to have traded over £100m worth of shares in the UK since it launched six months ago. The company's first European base opened in the UK in June last year. It now has 6,300 online customers and claims it is signing up an extra 200 each week. Guy Knight, executive vice president of marketing at the company, said: "There is still more to be done with the UK market. One thing is to open the US market to UK residents through the Web site. Another is to improve the front-end applications on the UK site to make it more user friendly." He added that the success of the UK market has been encouraging and plans are in place to extend into other European countries. Benjamin Ensor, analyst at Fletcher Research, said: "The US investment culture may be ahead of the UK, but this huge figure has established Schwab at the forefront of the UK retail electronic commerce market." He added that online trading has now become the second largest ecommerce market in the UK after computer hardware. A spokesman for Schwab said the majority of investors are private shareholders, but that does not mean they trade in small volumes. He pointed out that one customer sold shares worth £210,000 over the Internet in one deal.
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