Press Release

IT is no accident that Bendigo Bank owns about 14 per cent of the National Stock Exchange of Australia, as the NSX is following a very similar game plan. Just as one of the NSX's most recent listings is Murrimboola Financial Services (capital raised: just $680,000), the operator of the Harden-Murrumburrah Community Bank branch of Bendigo in that southern NSW area, so the exchange plans to develop community-owned stock exchanges around regional Australia. This is the main game plan of Richard Symon, three months into the job as NSX chief executive officer. First, though, he needs to persuade the larger investment community that the NSX is a force to be reckoned with. It was formed last year from the Newcastle Stock Exchange and the Bendigo Stock Exchange, neither likely to set off panic at the Australian Securities Exchange in their present forms. The Newcastle board was best known for the companies that left it to go to the ASX - Hindmarsh Resources, Diatreme Resources, A-Cap Resources and the Pioneer Permanent Building Society. For those left there, trading is light and sporadic. Their numbers include, for example, Yang Yang China Holdings, trading around 0.05c, whose main line of business is a treatment for scouring in piglets. The Bendigo exchange has few household names, apart from Brumby's Bakeries and Capilano Honey, and most of its listings are local community banks, now numbering close to 60 or about a third of the total of such organisations. The BSX did make the news last year when it set up an exchange for trading of Victorian taxi licences. NSX is also developing the Wollongong Exchange for Illawarra companies, a plan it hopes to replicate across Australia. Mr Symon has already been talking to councils in Queensland, Western Australia and northern Victoria. He wants to stay coy about exactly which towns are looking at these boards, but allows that Kalgoorlie would be an obvious one with a resources bent. They would be operated locally - just like Bendigo Bank's community branches - but all transactions would be administered through the NSX. Mr Symon sees these boards as giving regional Australians the chance to have a stake in local businesses. "They know the people who run these businesses and there's a level of trust," he adds. More than that, the NSX wants to carve a niche where it allows small companies to incubate and grow, then move on to the ASX. At Bendigo, for example, all you need is 50 shareholders (with stakes greater than $2000 each) and that the float totals more than 25 per cent of the company's shares. Apart from critical mass, Mr Symon also needs to tackle the settlement issue. Newcastle stocks are traded under the Clearing House Electronic Subregister System (or CHESS) but only through full service brokers. If you're a client of the big banks' stock services, such as CommSec or Westpac Broking, you still can't get in on this settlement. If you do a trade through Bendigo, you still get the old fashioned share certificate. Disclosure: the author owns Bendigo Bank shares