Australia’s social investment community SelfWealth has officially launched the first flat-fee brokerage solution in the country, and has already experienced strong take-up and interest.
SelfWealth founder and managing director Andrew Ward said the company initially set out to provide Australian investors with a community of like-minded individuals to help them make informed investment decisions.
“Our members can watch what, why, when and how other investors trade and track their performance, with full anonymity,” Ward said.
“As we have seen over the past three years, when you follow the best investors in the crowd you significantly outperform the ASX indices.”
SelfWealth launched its investment community through an exclusive partnership with BGL Corporate Solutions and has since seen significant take-up through BGL’s cloud SMSF administration software, Simple Fund 360.
“After launching our community, by popular demand we realised the next step was giving them the ability to execute those investment decisions within our software, hence we needed our own brokerage solution,” Ward noted.
“It had to be a brokerage with a strong value proposition to prise investors away from the large institutions so we introduced a flat-fee service.
“Our members have the ability to trade any value for a flat fee of $9.50 per trade, no commissions [and] no additional fees.”
The SelfWealth Trading solution has experienced strong take-up over the past two months, with about 60 per cent of investors selecting to transfer their portfolios from other brokers.
“We are working hard to raise our profile in the industry and we are getting there,” Ward said.
“Our relationship with BGL has contributed greatly to our recent success.”
BGL managing director Ron Lesh said SelfWealth was a natural extension of the Simple Fund 360 solution.
“We know the vast majority of SMSFs do not have a financial adviser,” Lesh said.
“This is where SelfWealth can help to fill the gap and provide our clients with the ability to follow the best investors in the crowd to improve their portfolio performance.”
The SelfWealth community has thousands of investors with over $1 billion in assets, with a split of 60 per cent of investors in SMSFs and 40 per cent in non-SMSF investments.
