ConSors AG, a subsidiary of Schmidt Bank, is Germany's biggest on- line broker.
Quite often, succeeding as a business credit line broker comes down to who you know more than what you know, so building a strong client base is the best way to succeed.
Because much of a business credit line broker's work is talking to business owners and lenders, excellent communication skills are a necessity.
Marketmakers from firms like Knight Securities and Mayer & Schweitzer, the main trading firms for big on- line brokers like Charles Schwab, E-trade and Ameritrade, began buying and selling its stock.
Now marketwatch.com, the business news site in which CBS Corp. and Data Broadcasting Corp. each hold a 38% stake, collects royalties from Sharper Image and gets a bounty from on- line brokers based on the number of new accounts they sign up, says Lawrence Kramer, chief executive of MarketWatch.
Computer skills are also becoming increasingly more important in the lending industry, and business credit line brokers are no exception.
Although many firms will hire brokers with a four-year degree, most business credit line brokers continue their education through the Master's level.
THE chirpy employee who answers the telephone at Charles Schwab, the owner of America's biggest on-line broker, is convinced: the share-trading service that Schwab advertises on its website is available to foreign customers all over the world through the Internet.
The firms range in size from a few people, such as IdeaMarket, a firm in Austin, Texas, that plans to serve as an on-line broker of intellectual property, to more than a hundred in the case of CitySearch, which creates Internet guides to cities and regions.
For where there is a customer eager for the latest virtual investment, there can also be a real, thick book of laws written to protect him.Take E*trade, an on-line broker based in Palo Alto, California, which was founded in 1992 and now claims 182,000 active customer accounts in America.
Don't limit yourself to one such on-line broker.
