The History of StockTrans - Part Three

So, how did we break through the stone wall put up by the big banks that dominated the industry? Funny you should ask… (Excuse the six month delay-I wasn’t in suspended animation. Au contraire! I was guiding us through the busiest year we’ve had in our 35 years. We’ve grown over 30% in just the past 12 months!).


By now, everyone knows that small businesses are the backbone of our economy-not just because they create a majority of our jobs, but because they sometimes grow into very big companies. In other words, (almost) every very big company started as a very little company. Well, back in the 70’s it wasn’t so obvious to everybody that small companies were indeed very important to our economy.


And none of the big bank agents were really serving the small companies. Oh, they had them as clients, all right, but they weren’t serving them. It was more like “You’re lucky we are taking you on as clients, so just be quiet and send us your money. We make you look good just by letting you mention our name in the same sentence as ours!”
Well, when there wasn’t much of a choice, there wasn’t much a small public company could do. There were some outliers in the transfer industry, of course, but the bigger non-bank agents wanted to be just like the bank agents, and the cowboys out west, were, at the time, let’s say…cowboys.


All of which leads us back to the question of how a very small transfer agent, in the heart of the financial megalopolis, headed by someone who, just like you, did not say as a child “Gee-when I grow up, I want to be a stock transfer agent!” , could establish itself in the “World of the Giants” (echo, echo, echo…). The answer was obvious to me and to anyone else who wasn’t inhaling through the 70’s—SERVICE! DUH! Something that was sorely missing at the time for all but the largest public companies.