Stock quotes are a broker’s lifeblood. A broker needs correct information to relay to clients. When that doesn’t happen, the broker looks incompetent and clients get frustrated. For most brokers, those all-important quotes are provided by two Toronto companies, Star Data Systems Inc., makers of StarQuote, and Bridge Information Systems Canada Inc., which supplies the Bridge system.
Brokers surveyed by Investment Executive for this year’s Brokerage Report Card indicated a distinct preference for one system over the other.
Brokers at the six firms surveyed that use StarQuote – Canaccord Capital Corp., TD Evergreen Investment Services Inc., CIBC Wood Gundy, BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., Merrill Lynch Canada Inc. and Goepel McDermid Inc. – gave an average score of 8.1. That was well ahead of the average score of 7.0, from the firms surveyed that use the Bridge system – RBC Dominion Securities Inc., Edward Jones Canada, National Bank Financial, and ScotiaMcLeod Inc. uses an in-house quote system.
Advisors who use the Bridge system had few nice things to say about it. “Bridge sucks,” says a broker from ScotiaMcLeod in Toronto, summing up the sentiments of many of his colleagues. “There’s a total lack of confidence in the operating system. We look like fools in front of our clients, who can get accurate quotes on television while our system crashes again.”
ScotiaMcLeod installed its system after Bridge absorbed Dow Jones Telerate. The Toronto broker says the move was a step backward, adding the company used the excuse that many of the Telerate applications were not Y2K compliant. Management efforts to promote the Bridge system by saying how well it was working at other firms fell on deaf ears. “This guy comes over a few days after the whole thing is introduced and says ‘Oh, everybody at DS loves it, they’re having no problems with it.’,” the broker says. “Then we call our contacts at DS and they want to strangle themselves [because they don’t like the system].”
DS advisors echo the frustrations. “It’s shit,” says a broker in Hamilton. “The thing barely works half the time. It would be easier to see a guy on top of the CN Tower waving quotes at me.”
Brokers at National Bank Financial say the system is overloaded, slow, complicated and breaks down often. “The system is clumsy and I find some things are kinda awkward,” says a National Bank Financial broker in Edmonton who has used both StarQuote and Bridge. “Down time is getting better since the last upgrade in the fall, but people have had problems with misquoted information.”
She says Bridge’s news and charting are better than StarQuote’s, but sluggishness and incorrect quote prices are dire concerns about the Bridge system.
At ScotiaMcLeod, a Toronto advisor who has worked with StarQuote says the two systems don’t compare. “ScotiaMcLeod will be writing cheques to clients because they got wrong quotes on their stocks or option trading. It’s already happened it will happen again. One works and one doesn’t, what else can I say?”
Some of the frustration stems from what brokers see as inaction on the part of management to make changes. A ScotiaMcLeod broker in eastern Ontario, says he doesn’t know what happens when he complains. “Speed is definitely a problem, whether that’s their problem or our problem here in Kingston, I don’t know, but it’s pissing us off,” he says. “Apparently, the depth of the market takes up a lot of brain power with this thing. We hate Bridge and we despise the people who decided on Bridge at ScotiaMcLeod.”
Then there’s the feeling of embarrassment when clients get more accurate quotes off the Internet. Brokers fear if clients can get better information from CNN or the Web, they’ll leave. The advisor at National Bank Financial in Ed-monton worries that if clients want to do their own trading, they can simply go to the Web sites of the companies to receive research, reports, mutual fund information – and real-time quotes.
If technology has made it so easy for the average investor to access research and accurate real-time quotes, brokers wonder why three of the country’s largest brokerage firms can’t do the same thing for industry professionals.
“Even if it’s a teletype machine, people used to get accurate infor-mation, darn it,” says the Toronto ScotiaMcLeod broker. “And now this is the year 2000, with the Internet and satellites flying all over the place, and we can’t get a simple stock quote.”
A senior Bridge executive says the system’s difficulties are the result of capacity problems. The company is working on upgrading both its “backbone” network and local circuits. He says growing pains are another problem.
“We have migrated about 11,000 terminals in Canada – the Legacy system into the Bridge system,” he says. “We have had some network outages that we are aware of and we are aware of clients’ complaints.” Improvements to the backbone system should be completed by the end of May, and those to local circuits by the end of the second quarter. Bridge is spending $300,000 a month on upgrades, the executive says.