ETFC
#We don't break out what portion of retirement assets are IRA versus other.
With regard to Stock Plan business, it shouldn't impact our opportunities of continuing to make those participants great customers of ETRADE and in fact, may give us some opportunities to have some discussions along the way as they may not be getting as well served by some of their other providers as a result of this.
Well, it's definitely burdensome but I think it's an opportunity for our model relative to others.
Well, we already do have a robo-advisory capability.
We've had it for some time.
We have our new version coming out later this year and something I look forward to talking more about on a subsequent call.
But I would say there are several fronts for us on this accelerating organic growth.
One is you will have seen us do some significant hiring over the last year and that's primarily across hiring more financial consultants.
It also has to do with adding along with account growth, additional customer service people so that we're providing good service, and adding some professionals into the corporate services participant experience area where some of our nascent efforts there are actually turning out very nicely.
The second is, we interact with every one of our customers digitally and you're seeing us do things to continue to improve our engine/mobile and to make our overall web experience and mobile experience the type of experience that makes people want to engage more fulsomely with us and with improving their financial health.
So it's a bit of doing a lot of little things better and continuing down the path.
Well, one of the things we are, as we said in the prepared comments, looking at is more along, as you think about the excitement that's taking place in the payment space across some of the fintech areas, are the type of things that we are starting to look at analytically with regard to, is that something we should build or is that something that I want to consider acquiring.
But there are definitely ways we can improve some of the capabilities of our banking and banking like activities.
Specifically, in the payments area.
Specifically in the payments area.
Thank you.
Well, I can tell you over the course of the quarter, we saw less initial activity in the early months and it did pick up a little bit in the later months but not meaningful enough to have an effect on the commission per trade, being down $0.02 from Q4.
But if you look back to last year, you will see that typically, there's a pretty powerful effect on commission per trade that we didn't see directly come directly through this quarter.
Whether we see some of that come through this quarter or not, I think we're going to have to wait and see how things progress.
Let me try and take those in turn.
I would say the ---+ jumping over the $50 billion mark is impacted by two things.
Clearly, you want to have a quantum of cash that makes it worth your while to earn on that cash.
Because the costs are the same, whether you're at $51 billion or $61 billion.
And the rate environment, obviously, makes it easier to jump more quickly; just do the math.
With regard to looking at fintech opportunities, I think the question for us continues to be, how quickly can we deploy something across our customer base and would it bring incremental revenues.
Would it strengthen the customer tie with our Company and so we're continuing to look.
I do think the valuations make certain deals difficult and so we evaluate that, but speed to market is important.
And I'm not all that familiar, I presume some of your guys would be more familiar than I am with a lot of fintech firms looking at actually acquiring something that's going to get them nicely regulated to the degree that I don't think they can even possibly imagine.
So that would be my way of looking at it.
Well, thank you, Ash.
Again, I want to thank everyone for joining us for this quarter.
I'm particularly proud of the team this quarter and look forward to talking to you in a few months.
Thank you.
Good-bye.
