Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has begun integrating the 60,000 Sanford Securities (Sanford) clients into its CommSec broking service.
CommSec managing director Matt Comyn confirmed the group had begun contacting Sanford clients, with a notification letter sent out to clients yesterday.
All Sanford clients will cease trading under the Sanford name and be automatically transferred over to CommSec by the end of January 2008, Comyn told InvestorDaily.
The transfer will not affect clients’ holder identification numbers, he said.
“January 25 will be the last day that Sanford clients will be able to place an order with Sanford and then on the 29th of January they will begin trading with CommSec,” Comyn said.
“We’re now in the process of communicating directly with Sanford clients and introducing them to our services. We’re expecting and hoping that just about all of them will come over.”
Comyn said all is on track to be completed ahead of the planned migration from IWL to Commsec.
Former IWL staff moved to CommSec and the banking group is working on enhancing IWL’s recently launched broking product, Virtual Broker Wrap, he said.
“We now own IWL as of a few weeks ago and so the staff haven’t all necessarily transferred over on contracts but their parent owner is now CommSec rather than IWL,” Comyn said.
“At this stage there are no plans to modify that. In fact if anything we’re looking at ways to enhance the service offering that we currently provide to our wholesale clients.”
Comyn said CommSec is also in discussions with IWL’s clients.
“We’re in discussions on an ongoing and operation level with all of our major wholesale clients,” he said.
“The retail business is a very close fit with our existing business, whereas the wholesale business will be run as a separate business with appropriate segregation and controls over, amongst other things, client data. It will be run as a standalone business with separate Chinese walls from the retail business. So it calls for a different approach.”
CBA announced in August that it intended to acquire the whole of IWL for more than $370 million.
In April, IWL sold its financial advisory software, Visiplan, to Iress for around $50 million. Iress also owns competitor Xplan.
