Technology from E*trade will now be exported to Scandinavia, with the Swedish site as the first to open for business.
The well-known E*trade is licensed to E*trade Nordic, with E*trade Group Inc. controlling over 12 percent of the company.
To stimulate the market, Sweden’s E*trade will offer free trading in June and July for customers who open custody accounts before June 24th.
The free offering is one way of attracting interest from new users. E*trade must compete with banks and other independent traders like Teletrade and Avanza, which also owns financial information site Inside.
The online brokerage trend is steadily increasing in the nonprofessional market as well. In Sweden, over 8 percent of the population is already making monthly payments through an Internet banking system. About 10 percent of trading on Stockholm Stock Exchange is now done online, and this volume is expected to grow quickly.
Johan Brenner, CEO of E*trade Nordic, said that the company is extremely proud of being a part of E*trade’s global and growing network and looks forward to the future development of E*trade as the leading place for online investments and personalized financial services.
E*trade Sweden customers can trade on three markets: the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE), the Stockholm Stock Information (SBI) and the Stockholm Options Market (OM).
The new site visitors will feature news from local Swedish and international market. In partnership with Delphi IT, E*trade has developed a diagram service called DigMan that presents the real-time development of individual stocks.
E*trade Nordic has not announced specific dates for plans to move in to the rest of the Scandinavian markets.