The Transformation Of Financial Services

We knew it was only a matter of time before traditional brokerages began to lose ground to the online space. But Michael Raneri, CEO of Zecco, an online, social media-oriented broker, believes that may have already happened.

“I think any financial services firm has some kind of Web or technology experience for their customers to interface with,” Raneri told Benzinga during a recent interview. “I think the need for branches will soon be no longer.”

Full Interview: The Rise Of The Financial Social Network With Zecco CEO Michael Raneri

In the near future, Raneri said that we might not even have brick and mortar branches of financial institutions. “I think there will always be a certain segment of investors that want to meet with a financial professional,” he said. “But there's no need for retail space. I mean, when was the last time you went into a bank to withdraw money?”

Going forward, Raneri said we can expect even further evolutions. “A lot of brokerage firms, a lot of portals for that matter, spend a lot of money driving traffic to their website,” he continued. “There's some information I saw where the number of page views on the mobile deck in 2012 will exceed the number of page views through browsers. No one expected that.”

“We have a very innovative release called Zap Trade where you can trade from your favorite portals where you get your financial information and your ideas,” Raneri continues, noting that Zap Trade has been deployed on over 75 different sites and is exposed to 26 million unique users per month.

“So not having to come back to Zecco.com to place your trades; being able to place your trades directly from the information that you're reading – on sites like Yahoo! Finance (NASDAQ: YHOO), Google Finance (NASDAQ: GOOG), CNN Money – through a small browser plug-in, or through a relationship we have with those portals.”

And that's just the beginning. “It's probably premature, but we have two platforms coming out,” Raneri adds. “A whole new trading platform that will particularly provide great value to more complex options traders. And we have an iPhone app in beta that we're very excited to roll out.”

Zecco also has a social network, ZeccoShare, with over 350,000 members. “With social media, it's become more than just connecting and communicating with likeminded people,” Raneri said. “It's the community intelligence that comes out of it, where you can discuss investment ideas, share strategies, and share a position.”

Zecco mines that data and turns it into market data. Raneri said that when you get a quote on Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), “you also see how many people in the community bought and sold Apple in the last period of time. People who hold Apple, how do they perform, versus people who don't.”

To hear more from Zecco's chief executive – including his story on negotiating the first online brokerage offering – don't miss Benzinga's full interview with Michael Raneri.