Saturday, February 28, 2009

Dematerialising Share Purchase

Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank have offered existing shareholders the purchase of additional shares. With the offer comes a paper form to fill in and return. The obvious way to "dematerialise" this process would be to offer an electronic form which could be sent via the Internet. But if you pay electronically using Bpay, the process is even simpler: send the money and send no form at all. Because a client reference number is provided with each share offer and this number is sent as part of the payment, the sender can be identified and no separate form is required. Apart from the complexity of processing the form, this removed the worry of security of the information over the Internet (the payment transaction goes via the banking system). This process could be used for many more transactions.

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