Financial portals offer online, real-time stock trading and price quotation services. Their services for members include up to the minute stock price quotations, stock order placements and executions, and professional advices on portfolio management. In order to use their services, you need to create an account by providing personal information as well as a login and password.
The account record can save time for members when they request for stock price quotations and market analyses. Further, portfolio management is faster and easier when the portals store members’ stock portfolios and preferences. Financial portal members may also receive discounts on commission fees (for stock transactions) and service fees (for stock price quotations).
By providing personal information to a financial portal, you gain potential benefits but lose some extent of privacy. The impact on your privacy depends on the portal’s policy. Since the portal retains all member information, there is a chance that member information may be stored with errors or, after a certain period of time, become outdated. Further, the portal may use member information for other purposes, such as analyzing the member’s web-usage patterns. Finally, it is possible that unauthorized persons (intentionally or unintentionally) get access to the personal information stored in a portal.
All of the portals ask members for the following personal information during registration:
Consider a selection of financial portals that differ in their privacy policies and the benefits that they possibly provide. For the purpose of this exercise assume that all financial portals offer the features that you value. In the following screens, we describe the various dimensions that you may regard as important when deciding which financial portal to sign up with.