The Yield Exchange Advantage: How we bring the power of information back to the investor

How do you make your investment decisions? 

Whether you’re just getting your start as a retail investor or helping manage finances for a small (or not-so-small) organization, the process always starts with gathering information. Since investing is a two-way street between the issuer and the investor, we need a way for both parties to communicate with each other, a place for them to exchange information.  

Once upon a time, an exchange was a literal place, all the way back to people running around 17th century Amsterdam, yelling at each other about the next big investment opportunity.  

Even though most exchanges now exist only online, they still provide crucial spaces for investors to get quick and easy access to the information they need to make the best decisions. 

But because GICs aren't bought and sold in public markets like bonds and stocks information isn't as easy to come by. That is until Yield Exchange came along

Purchasing a GIC before Yield Exchange

Before Yield Exchange, purchasing a GIC was not the most transparent affair. Typically, you’d look up what your bank was offering you, evaluate the different options, pick the one that worked best, and hope that you didn’t miss anything in the terms that could come back to bite you. 

Unless you spent hours looking through the terms and rates with different institutions, you had no real way of knowing if you were getting the best deal, which isn't a great experience, especially if you just accept something right away - the specific terms of a GIC are something you can negotiate.

“Wait, are you saying that I can ask my bank for a better deal on my rate?” 

Yes, we are, and more than that, we think you should!  

With rates being more competitive than ever, investors shouldn't settle for subpar rates, especially when making a big organizational investment. Yet so often we do because of the sheer time it would take to call up a bunch of institutions and explain your situation. In other words, it’s too hard to exchange information about GICs. 

The Yield Exchange advantage 

At Yield Exchange's core, we believe investors should have access to GIC offers and be able to “shop around” for GICs with the same ease as in other investments. That’s why we’ve adopted one of the longest-standing, tried-and-true methods of exchanging investment information, the auction. 

An auction is one of the simplest and most effective methods in a two-sided marketplace. With Yield Exchange, you post your potential size of investment and the types of terms you're looking for. Instantly, we send your post to over 20 (and growing) financial institutions, and within minutes, they can back to you and by the end of the auction period, you have a range of different offers giving you the most up-to-date information possible, tailored precisely to your unique investment situation. 

Maybe your bank wasn’t giving you the best offer, or maybe it was, but at least now you have the information you need to negotiate.

The difference between Yield Exchange and a broker 

The challenges associated with shopping for GICs aren't new, and why many people turn to brokers

At first glance, both Yield Exchange and a broker “give investors easy access to multiple GICs. But if we look further, the difference is that with a broker, there’s someone in the middle doing the hard work of sourcing different GIC products, whereas with Yield Exchange, you get a direct connection to the financial institution. While there might be some benefits of going to a broker, especially if you’re looking for additional financial advice, here are a few things that you get with Yield Exchange that you won't get with a broker

1. Instant and direct communication with a financial institution
2. Negotiate for yourself: Ultimately with a broker, you still have the same problem where all your information is limited through just one channel. You are still relying on a third party to understand your situation, be knowledgeable of available options, and negotiate on your behalf. For online brokers, you only have access to whatever products they’ve already sourced. 
   
   Yield Exchange links you directly to financial institutions, so you can instantly evaluate the options yourself and negotiate a counteroffer with a bank directly. 
3. Much much lower commissions: Since we facilitate direct conversation between you and the institution, rather than processing requests manually, we don't charge investors for each request. While a typical broker might take 25 basis points (0.25%) on a transaction, Yield Exchange takes only 5 bps (0.05%).  
    
   Additionally, we only take our commission once your money is deposited with the bank. This means that you can continue using our platform to look for rates as long as you need to at no charge. 
4. Privacy and information security: Taking commission directly from the bank has the extra benefit that we never need to handle your cash. You don’t need to worry at all about putting your money through a third-party platform. Your cash never leaves your hands until the moment it reaches the bank. 
    
   This means that you can use Yield Exchange without divulging any kind of sensitive information. Signing up to post deposit requests through our platform is faster than any broker, and you can rest assured that your data is safe in your own hands. 

Revolutionizing the world of GICs 

One of the most valuable things about technology is the way it can provide a completely new way of doing something to make it faster, easier, and more widely available for more people.  

That’s the Yield Exchange advantage.

We win when everyone wins, so we work hard to get you the best deals we can. From small businesses to large municipalities, we’ve helped hundreds of organizations find better rates and change the way they use GICs for the better. 

We’re excited to keep on growing and finding more ways we can bring value to both our depositors and our financial partners, so if you want to know more, stay tuned as we continue to update our blog, and feel free to contact us to learn how you can join our platform.