National Australia Bank (NAB) launched on Wednesday nabtrade, its own online share trading platform which will mainly target investors in self-managed superannuation funds.

By combining that focus with day-to-day online broking services, nabtrade will change the game in the online broking sphere, said NAB Wealth Group Executive Steve Tucker.

NAB is considered a late bloomer since rivals ANZ has already its E*Trade and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) its CommSec. The two online trading companies control over 50 per cent of the online broking market in Australia with a combined 1.7 million clients.

Mr Tucker said nabtrade offers a state-of-the-art technology platform which retired NAB's old limited online trading service that used a trading platform through IWL, a third party service provider. NAB started to develop its own in-house system after IWL was purchased by CBA.

The new platform will be integrated with NAB's customer bank accounts which makes possible the movement in and out of funds in the trading account in real time. Mr Tucker said one more plus that nabtrade will offer to clients is quality of stock research which would be better than that of its competitors.

With the launch of nabtrade, traditional full-service brokers would have to compete with a shrinking market. Data from the Australian Securities Exchange said that cash market trades continued its decline by 26 per cent in August compared to the same month in 2011. Value of trades dipped 38 per cent to $167.5 billion.

The platform was developed by Oracle and allows sync with existing applications and IT functions used by banks such as core banking deposits, loan functions and online service applications.

"The platform integrates all three software layers of the bank into one system, and moves the bank away from bespoke legacy systems . . . . One of the most significant long-term benefits to customers will be the ease at which the platform can upgrade and shift to meet new innovation for decades to come," CIO quoted the NAB spokesperson.

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