Double Identity - online financial supermarkets - Statistical Data Included

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, June, 2000 by Manuel Schiffres

MONEY | Bank, broker or both? We found the best FINANCIAL SUPERMARKETS for one-stop online shopping.

THE BATTLE BETWEEN brokers and bankers for the hearts and pocketbooks of America is moving to the Net, with bankers and brokers teaming up so you can conduct your financial affairs from the comfort of your computer, at a single Web site.

The advantage: convenience. The Meal online broker-banker combines low commissions and generous access to funds and research with high yields on savings and plenty of free ATM transactions. It's easy to use, letting you fill out one application for both investing and banking accounts. It allows you to log on to get an instant snapshot of all your assets and transfer money from your investment account to your bank account (or vice versa) with a few clicks. And it permits you to qualify for premium services and special treatment when you combine your account balances.

On the other hand, combining your accounts online is bound to involve a few sacrifices. Naturally, you have to feel comfortable making transactions over the Internet. Although an online broker-banker is likely to have branches for times when you crave a tete-a-tete transaction, chances are it won't be as convenient as the bank at your local strip mall. And you can probably get lower broker commissions if you're not concerned about banking at the same institution.

Banks in particular have become aggressive in pushing their online offerings. "For a long time, banks treated their discount brokerages as an afterthought," says analyst Chris Musto of Gomez Advisors (www.gomez .com), which tracks online financial-services providers. "More recently, banks have caught the relationship-marketing bug and, having seen the Internet driving business, have started to drive it up." Some have begun linking their banking services to broker ages they either acquired or established themselves. And some full-service financial supermarkets have been created exclusively for the Internet.

Winners and losers

IT'S NOT SURPRISING that one of the Internet-only outfits, WingspanBank.com, should wind up at the top of our rankings. Wingspan doesn't have the cheapest brokerage commissions or the lowest margin rates or the highest CD yields. But its scores are average to outstanding for most of the services we judged. And Wingspan soars above all the others in integrating its banking and brokerage services.

"The system is built to move money back and forth," says Terry Ransford, president and chief operating officer of Wingspan Investment Services, the unit's brokerage arm. "We want Wingspan to be as competitive as it needs to be without considering the pricing model and structures of the bricks-and-mortar business."

TD Waterhouse also receives five stars overall in our survey, although it scored fewer points than Wingspan. It was strong on both broker and bank functions, but could have done better on ATM access and fees as well as phone response time.

Not every institution in our survey lives up to the promise of all-in-one convenience. DLJdirect, for example, finished next-to-last in the overall scoring, partly because it lacks bill-paying on its roster of services. Had DLJ offered a fairly priced bill-paying service, it probably would have jumped to three stars in our rankings. And two-star-rated Dreyfus Brokerage Services, owned by Mellon Bank, couldn't recover from abysmal ratings for its banking functions. Ironically, our lowest-scoring institution is Bank One, the parent company of WingspanBank.com. Bank One suffered low marks nearly across the board.

We asked each institution to answer our questions for two types of customers: one with $10,000 in assets and the other with $100,O00--a level at which true "relationship" money management often kicks in. For the most part, the type of account that allows customers to conduct banking as well as brokerage functions--even at institutions with a bank-dominated heritage--is the management or asset-management account. (The minimum for Fidelity Investments' asset-management account is $30,000, although you can open a basic brokerage account with less; Merrill Lynch Direct's minimum is $20,000.) Three firms--E*Trade (which owns Telebank), First Union and Chase (which owns both Brown & Co. and Chase Investment Services brokerage unit)--declined to participate.

What follows is a look at the best and worst in each of the dozen categories we included in our survey. The table introduction explains our methodology. For an even more complete description, plus the ability to sort the rankings by category, go to www.kiplinger.com/onestop. Keep in mind that institutions are changing--and mostly improving--their offerings all the time.

Synergy. Excuse the overused term. But when you're putting all your assets into one basket in the name of convenience, you should know how easy it is to access banking and brokerage features from the same Web site.

WingspanBank.com is most impressive at creating a seamless connection. It lets you open your banking and brokerage accounts with a single online application and then conduct your business (as well as apply for mortgages, credit cards and insurance products) by logging on to a single Web site. Wingspan sweeps brokerage proceeds into a money-market mutual fund. Clients can easily transfer those assets to FDIC-insured checking accounts. (One negative: Brokerage and banking statements are separate.)