Scottrade – Founded in 1980 by Rodger O. Riney, Scottrade is a retail stockbroker company; they facilitate and efficiently help firms, businesses or clients with sales.
Retail Brokers
Being a Retail broker company they work more with individuals or clients by becoming the middle man between a buyer and securities seller. Retail brokers are usually representative from a retail brokerage company who are licensed to sell securities (futures, swaps, bonds, stocks, debentures, banknotes and so on). They are also trained to provide advice to clients on how to invest in securities, manage their retirement accounts and assets.
Depending on how well established a retail broker company, they could earn quite a lot especially with the fact that they do not just sell ordinary goods but securities, the deals and commissions on some of these securities sales can be quite large.
Scottrade Infamous History
Found in Scottsdale Arizona, was one of the biggest American retail stockbroker company, in 1981 they opened their first branch office and since then it’s been high rocket success for them. By 1991 they could boast of 15 branches and by the late 90’s when the internet started taking jobs from Human brokers they already had an online website and by 2000 ninety percent of their trade was done online.
At this growth rate, the company was already the best in the business, even the 2000s saw more success from Scottrade, by 2008 they already owned a bank and launched a mobile application in 2009. They were monsters when it came to online marketing and advertising, unfortunately, as to everything great, there comes an end.
Scottrade Fall
We all know that as of the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, being a broker was a very lucrative career choice, They were so important in the Investment business helping clients make strategic decisions and efficiently making Securities sales. Well, the Internet came into the picture and has made quite a mess of the career.
This did not really affect Scottrade because they evolved and this development might have maybe strengthened them because as of 2003 and 2004 they made ninety-eight percent of their trade online and the company retail branches were 211 in number respectively.
So what Happened?
In 2008 the company was charged by SEC (U.S Securities and Exchange Commission) for fraudulent misrepresentation, and paid $950,000, in 2014 another bad record came up when the company failed to realise that it was missing data over a six-year period, SEC investigated the issue and found them guilty meaning they had to pay over $2 million which they did.
Well, in October 2015, Scottrade later revealed that they were hacked between late 2013 and early 2014 in which personal records of about 4.6 million clients were accessed. Well, this was bad for a company of their stature because they had no idea of what happened until Federal authorities started an investigation on the issue on Scottrade and other financial firms.
In November 2015, Scottrade had to pay $2.6 million when the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority investigated their missing files (over 168 million outgoing emails containing trading information) and fined them.
All these issues and more resulted in a decision to sell the company, in September 2017, the online brokerage division of the company was sold to TD Ameritrade and the banking sector to Toronto-Dominion bank.