Challenger has struck up a new distribution deal, this time with Citibank.
Challenger has struck up a new distribution deal, this time with Citibank.
The group will initially distribute Citibank’s global warrants in Australia. This first deal with Citibank will give Australian investors access to select US and Japanese warrants on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange for the first time using Australian dol-lars, according to Challenger’s head of investment banking Alastair Davidson.
“This will allow investors to effectively buy into a global market. The liquidity of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange is good and for people who want to trade and who are active investors, this is a great product,” Davidson says.
Citibank’s head of warrants in Australia Michael Igla says the global warrants are the first of “a whole swag of products” to be released over time to Australian in-vestors. Worldwide, Citibank currently transacts $3 billion in the market, accord-ing to Igla, making a turnover of about $210 million a day. Australia’s daily turn-over in this market is $13 million.
Challenger says it will distribute the global warrants to its existing client base for a flat $65 charger per trade and also through a new web site it is establishing. War-rants.com.au will be “a major distribution point for warrant products, one of a number of web sites Challenger will be introducing”, according to Davidson. On top of this, the group says it will continue with the “traditional distribution net-works” of brokers and financial planners.
The 23 US warrants include telecommunications and IT/Internet stocks, such as Amazon.com, America Online, Cisco Systems, Compaq Computer, IBM, Mo-torola, Sun Microsystems and Yahoo!
The 14 Japanese warrants include the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, NEC, Nissan Motor, Sharp, Softbank, Sony and Toshiba.
