Call center agent prepares for early retirement

Lexlie Grace Genovisa is a 29-year-old call center agent based in Cebu who intends to set up and manage her own business in the future. She also aims to build up funds enough to invest in real estate someday, help her family and retire at an early age.

Gainfully employed for the last eight years, Genovisa started saving up four years ago to empower herself to reach her long-term goals.

“I wish I had started saving when I first had my salary, but as the saying goes, it’s better late than never. I now think about the help it will someday enable me to provide to my family,” she tells the Inquirer.

COL’s Vice President and Chief Technical Analyst, Juanis Barredo, and COL’s 100,000th customer, Lexlie Genovisa, a call center agent from Cebu.

In the next few years, she wants to send her baby sister to a good school as well as provide medical and retirement assistance to her parents. When she accomplishes all these, the call center agent says, it will make her “heart leap with joy.”

Genovisa is among the growing number of young Filipinos who have evolved from being mere consumers to savers and then to investors, recognizing the need to protect and grow wealth for the future. After reading the writings of missionary, best-selling author and financial freedom advocate Bo Sanchez in the blog/newsletter Truly Rich Club, she was inspired to invest a small portion of her salary in stocks for the next 20 to 30 years.

Free of stress

“I want to be able to retire comfortably,” she says, adding she would like to do so while she’s still young.

“I would like to be free of the stress many of us worry about every day: money for rent, for tuition, for hospital bills/medication, for everyday expenses. I want to have the freedom to pursue my own dreams and share more,” she adds.

She recently opened an account at COL Financial Group, the country’s leading online stockbroker. In doing so, she became COL’s 100,000th client—a milestone which the 15-year-old local stock brokerage marked with the same fervor as when the Philippines welcomed the 100 millionth Filipino baby.

Breaching the 100,000-client mark means that one of nearly six trading accounts in the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) uses COL’s online trading platform. Since 2008, COL Financial has been the number one brokerage in the stock exchange in terms of the number of transactions executed.

Catering to the retail market was a challenging business during COL’s early years, founder and chair Edward Lee recalls. It’s a business that needs a lot of volume to make money.

Lee built up COL after his stint overseas. Financial literacy is his personal advocacy.

He enlisted stock market veterans like Conrado “Dino” Bate, who joined COL in 2003 after heading JP Morgan Securities Philippines Inc.

Although he couldn’t match what the big foreign houses were giving, Lee tells people that he compensates by giving his senior people stock options. Although Lee has other businesses, like an upscale furniture distribution business, he finds COL a very fulfilling venture, especially when he meets clients, such as overseas workers, who have succeeded in stock investing using its platform.

Over the last 15 years, COL has become the leading online stock brokerage in the country, gaining disciples mostly through word of mouth. Apart from hearing about COL from Bo Sanchez, for instance, Genovisa heard more about the online stock brokerage from office mates who started to invest in stocks ahead of her.

“I choose COL because it is a trusted online stock trading platform. It has been in the industry for 15 years. It is very easy to use. It offers a host of online trading and information services that I need. I also like their customer service; you get a quick response when you e-mail them and that is very important to me since I don’t get to check the market every day,” she says.

Based on the latest financial report of COL, a publicly listed company with a market capitalization of P6.75 billion, its minimum opening balance is one of the lowest in the industry at P5,000. COL also charges the lowest allowable commission rate at 0.25 percent per transaction, or a minimum of P20 per transaction.

Growth drivers

“COL has made stock market investing (easy) for everyone by providing the necessary support our clients need to invest wisely in the stock market,” says Bate.

Based on a straightforward computation of dividing client assets by the number of customers, Bate estimates that the average portfolio size per customer at COL is around P500,000. In terms of volume of activity, they trade around two to three times a month.

COL founder and chair Edward Lee (center) with COL vice chair Alexander Yu (left) and president Conrado Bate (right).

Through COL Securities (HK) Ltd., its Hong Kong subsidiary, and the parent company’s Equity Advisory Group (EAG), a team of seasoned professionals, COL has expanded its services to cater to the needs of high net worth individuals and institutions.

As of the first half of the year, COL’s self-directed customers comprised around 40 percent of its total business while the advisory and agency business accounted for 20 percent, Bate says.

“The age range of our customer starts from early teens to over 60 years old and above. However, bulk of our customers are within the 30- to 44-year-old range,” he says.

By gender, about 55 percent of COL’s clients are male and 45 percent female. Although the mix still favors men, the share of female investors has significantly improved over the years.

Around four years ago, Bate notes that the mix was 70-30 percent favoring males.

Asked how he would gauge the risk appetite of Filipino retail investors, Bate says: “Based on our observations, since bulk of our customers are first time investors in the stock market, a good number of them are moderately conservative as they try to understand how the stock market works…. We continue to encourage to stick to the discipline that we actively promote, which is investing in good quality companies in the stock market for the long term.”

Mystery

To date, less than 1 percent of Filipinos invests in the stock market which, for many, is still a mystery rather than the quintessential asset class for anyone who wants to diversify portfolio and improve returns.

As COL shares its founder’s advocacy of investor education for the public, the brokerage holds several seminars weekly at the COL Training Center with topics ranging from the basics of stock market investing to technical analysis and how to trade online and better understand research reports. It has also set up shop in Makati—at the Citibank Tower—to create a new venue for customers looking to open accounts and attend trading seminars.

COL is also teaming up with Caylum Trading Institute (CTI), which was set up by Edmund Lee, son of the COL founder who is following his father’s thrust on financial education.

Caylum focuses on developing professional traders who can execute effective trading strategies across global markets.

Through its easy investment program (EIP), which was launched in August 2008, COL promotes an investment program that uses peso cost averaging methodology designed for all types of investors.

Peso averaging, a model seen most suitable to newbies, is the strategy of choosing one company or a few high-quality ones to invest in regular intervals over a period of time, thereby minimizing risk. Peso averaging is the same strategy that Bate had set up for his own household staff. He helped build up benefit funds for his driver.

But COL isn’t stopping at brokering stocks. Very soon, it will soon launch its mutual fund distribution business that uses its existing proprietary trading platform.

COL has brought onboard veteran fund manager Marvin Fausto—former chief investment officer of Banco de Oro Unibank—to build this new business.

The plan is to distribute the mutual funds managed by other institutions, five of which have so far signed up: Philequity Management; ATR Kim Eng Mutual Funds; Bank of the Philippine Islands’ ALFM, Sun Life Asset Management Co. and Philam Asset Management Inc.

“As we continue to expand our business, we remain optimistic about the continued growth of our customer base and assets,” Bate says.