NEW YORK-DataLink Systems Corp. has launched QuoteXpress securities information service via pagers for commercial use in the United States.
DataLink, now a public company headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., has more than a thousand customers in Canada where the company was started in 1993, said Nicholas Miller, its founder and chairman.
More than 98 percent of DataLink’s existing customers don’t own their own pagers. Consequently, the company has teamed up with Paging Network Inc. in the United States to bundle the QuoteXpress service with Motorola Inc.’s Adviser Gold FLEX pagers. The package will cost U.S. customers $40 per month. Customers who already own pagers also have the option to receive the service over any paging network.
QuoteXpress monitors and receives real-time ticker data for all North American and major international exchanges, covering more than 200,000 issues traded.
“We offer a 30-day, unconditional guarantee,” Miller said. “Our stick (retention) rate has been so high that it’s one of the easiest ways to market the product.”
Last month, Claflin Communications Inc. announced it had begun offering its StockTIPS service over PageNet’s network. Miller said the primary difference between StockTIPS and QuoteXpress is that the former notifies its user of changes in customer-selected stocks based on “absolute price levels” reached by the securities, as programmed by the customer.
QuoteXpress, by contrast, alerts its users according to dollar-and-cent changes in their preselected stocks. In so doing, it offers the beeper version of a cardiogram assessing the heartbeat of a stock’s trading over the course of the day, Miller said. “This is a fundamental difference, not a subtle one.”
Initially, DataLink is targeting amateur players in the stock market.
It also is developing a QuoteXpress package for individual brokers to offer their customers. Additionally, the company is in negotiations with brokerage firms in the United States. This aspect of its U.S. rollout seeks to replicate its Canadian business model, in which brokerage firms offer subsidized, co-branded packages to their customers. T.D. Greenline and Hong Kong Discount Trading use the Canadian version, called Trade Alert.
QuoteXpress customers tend to trade securities more frequently, a fact that enhances revenue for brokerage firms, Miller said. Furthermore, QuoteXpress permits brokers to execute transaction confirmations almost automatically. By contrast, conventional transaction confirmation procedures-a non-revenue producing function-occupy more than a third of the typical broker’s business time, he said. QuoteXpress also lets brokers send other messages to their clients.
