LOYAL3 has created a business around helping your favorite companies offer you Customer Stock Ownership Plans. Employees are often offered the opportunity to purchase discounted stock directly from the company, why not customers? In addition, employees are often eligible for exclusive deals, why not customers who own stock? After all, they are owners and valuable customers.
The 3 in LOYAL3 represents bringing together three important groups: 1. The company itself, its management and employees, 2. The company’s customers, and 3. The company’s shareholders, its owners. These three groups have a natural affinity and benefit from each other in many ways. What has stood in the way of this happening before has been the difficulty and transaction cost of buying stock.
Part of what we’ve been able to figure out is how to make it absurdly easy and inexpensive to own companies. In fact, it’s as easy as buying products over the Web. With our platform, there are absolutely no transaction fees to buy stock, and it takes just four-clicks and a few minutes. It’s the easiest way to invest in companies ever created.
The benefits to customers are obvious. It’s smart to buy stock from companies you know and trust, especially when you are a customer and can get deals on stock and products. And when there are no fees, it makes even more sense.
The advantages to the company are less obvious– but still substantial. Let’s start with the fact that according to studies done by Bain & Company and Opinion Research, customers who own stock are more valuable than customers who don’t. It’s that simple. They spend up to three times more than ordinary customers, refer up to two times more people, and visit stores and web sites almost twice as often.
In addition, almost half of all Americans would like to buy stock directly from companies with whom they do business with, but either don’t know how to or don’t have the ability given current options.
So, think about your favorite companies, the ones whose products you love. And imagine a way to own them for real, and through that ownership gain exclusive benefits only available to customers that are also owners.
Sound like a plan?
A New Paradigm for Capitalism
The CEO of a strategic partner mentioned to us the other day that she thought that what we were doing at LOYAL3 was developing a new paradigm for capitalism. That by taking Wall Street and brokerage firms out of the picture, and enabling more non Wall Street types of people to easily and inexpensively buy stock from companies they shop at and trust, LOYAL3 was re-aligning the markets.
We were connecting companies, customers and owners, in a more stable system. We were taking Wall Street to Main Street. And it’s probably better off there.
Main Street has honest motives. Main Street is “buy and hold” investors who care about the companies in which they invest. Main Street doesn’t “short” stock, or “day trade” stock, they invest for the long haul. This is good for the Companies, good for the stability of our markets, and good for Main Street investors.
Over time, the logical outcome of having more people buy stock from companies they know and trust would be more stable companies and markets. If people who are loyal to companies owned those companies and held the stock for years, rather than days or even minutes, we’d all be better off.
So while we at LOYAL3 are a long way off from re-aligning the markets, we’d like to believe that every time even a single share of stock from a great company falls into the hands of a devoted, loyal customer, someone who knows that company and does business with them, the better off we’ll all be.
Disintermediation is a big idea. But nothing tops giving power back to the people, and that just feels right.