National Bank Correspondent Network (NBCN) Inc., a subsidiary of Montreal-based National Bank Financial Inc., made a deal with Toronto-based PriceMetrix Inc. to offer its CommissionCheck SaaS product as an added feature to its subscription service.
David Burnes, executive vice-president of NBCN, said it’s “the largest provider of outsourcing services for the financial services community.” NBCN “services independents, providing them with technology tools, trading tools – basically the infrastructure they need to carry on business as a securities dealer,” he said.
Doug Trott, CEO of PriceMetrix, called the contract a “win on all sides,” as NBCN customers who opt-in to CommissionCheck get unparalleled insight into the value of purchases, making important buying decisions and pricing a lot easier.
For PriceMetrix, the contract will allow it to further increase a vastly growing Canadian customer base, one that already includes 60 per cent of all Canadian financial brokers, Trott said.
CommissionCheck works by using analytics data to compare potential trades against previous commissions at a customer’s firm, as well as across the entire industry.
Burnes said the process starts when PriceMetrix “takes data from us – principally commissioned data attached to trades, but you need more than just the commissions because you have to understand the size of the trade – and then they take that and (PriceMetrix) runs it through a process and provides a further service to the industry that I don’t do and frankly, nobody else does.”
Trott said that, with CommissionCheck, an “advisor can identify and target revenue opportunities while gaining the confidence to charge a fair price by being in the know.”
Burnes said now, “when a broker is doing a trade for a client … the broker can have a sense of where the market is on commissions.” “It speeds up business and it allows the rep to defend his pricing, which has been a tough thing with all the marketing in everybody’s face about discount commissions,” Burnes said.
He added that “commissions range anywhere from probably $75 to $300, depending on size of trade, number of shares, value of the share, what market it was traded on and, what was the advice given; what’s the value of that advice? (CommissionCheck) has allowed these representatives to better position themselves.”
Amrita Mathur, director of marketing for PriceMetrix, said this contract announcement comes in tandem with PriceMetrix offering “a new feature (as well as) a new product.” Now, instead of only being able to access CommissionCheck from its own dashboard, PriceMetrix has activated the “ability to offer just the data.” This means customers can integrate CC data directly into their own order entry system instead of adding yet another program to the chain.
Mathur credits PriceMetrix’s recent, and ongoing, success to the difference between it and its competitors; PriceMetrix software is built “for brokers, by brokers.”
For existing NBCN customers, all that’s needed to activate a CommissionCheck subscription is to turn it on in the NBCN dashboard. Owing to its nature as a SaaS, the rest is automated.