St. George Directshares Review Australia & Test 2024

There is currently no new customer offer available on the St George Directshares Australia platform. With that being said, our St George Directshares rating didn’t take too big of a knock as the platform itself is fantastic.

In order to access the St George Directshares Australia platform, you will need to have an eligible St George, Bank of Melbourne or BankSA bank account. If you have an account with one of these banking institutions you can immediately start your account opening process. This shouldn’t take you longer than a few minutes as all you’ll need to do is fill in some personal information about yourself.

To finish off the process, you will need to verify your identity by providing St George Directshares Australia with a copy of one of your I.D. documents. However, most applicants can be identified online already so chances are you won’t actually need to send through any documents.

4.3/5

St. George Directshares Stocks

T&Cs apply, 18+

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St. George Directshares Highlights

• Access over 2,200 different companies' shares
• Able to trade on all major exchanges
• Formidable and efficient trading platform

The St George Directshares Australia platform can be a little tricky to navigate at first. If you want to log in, you’ll need to select the “login” button in the top right-hand corner of the homepage. From there, select the “direct shares platform” option. Once you have done that you can check out what the platform is really all about. For the most part after that initial step, we had no issues navigating around the site. You can still find the available financial markets and fees and more in the menus at the top of the homepage.

The actual usability of the site could do with a little work as there is a fair amount of clutter. This is largely due to the fact that you can see all of the banking options that St George Directshares Australia offers as well, in addition to its trading platform. Apart from that, all the pages loaded quickly so you shouldn’t have any issues moving from page to page.

From what we could gather after scouring the St George Directshares Australia platform there are currently two different accounts you can have with the broker. A Standard account and a Power account. To be honest, we couldn’t find much information on the platform itself with regards to what each account offers but we managed to locate some information.

4.3/5

St. George Directshares Stocks

T&Cs apply, 18+

-

St. George Directshares Highlights

• Access over 2,200 different companies' shares
• Able to trade on all major exchanges
• Formidable and efficient trading platform

Your Standard trading account is free from any monthly fees but if you opt to use the Power trading account then you may have to pay a monthly fee of $50 if you don’t make more than 10 trades per month.

Apart from that, it would appear that both accounts have the same level of access to the available trading instruments on the platform. Both accounts will have to download the St George Directshares Australia trading platform onto their desktops in order to conduct online trading.

Quite frankly, the site provides little to no information on the unique benefits of each account. We would recommend getting in touch with their customer support. We can’t really let this affect our St George Directshares ranking as the broker is also technically a banking institution so they clearly have a lot on their plate.

Fees –  fairly steep trading fees

There are a few different fees for you to keep in mind but from what we can gather St George Directshares Australia does not charge any inactivity fees on your trading account.

The fees that are in place seem to work on a per amount basis up until a certain point for phone trading. For example, you will need to pay $70 for trades in the region of $0 – $15,000 in a single month. From there you will need to pay 0.4% of the total trade amount done between $15,000 – $55,000 with phone trading. $55,000 – $1 million per month will see you charged 0.35% of your trade value. And lastly, anything north of $1 million will be charged a fee of 0.13%

It would appear that there are two trading platforms available at St George Directshares Australia and that is their own platform. You will need to download either platform in order to start trading online with the broker. There is no option to trade via the web on the actual website. Everything will go through the downloaded platform on your desktop or laptop. You can also download the platform to your mobile with the St George Directshares Australia mobile app.

The St George Directshares Australia trading platforms give you access to over 100 charting tools to help you identify market trends and enhance your overall trading strategies. Furthermore, the platform has heaps of market analysis available that lets you compare over 300 different stocks with key metrics across different sectors. And this is all only for the St George Directshares Australian standard platform.

The St George Directshares Australia pro platform gives you access to even more trading tools, instruments, real-time data streaming and customizable charts. You will need to pay up to $50 a month if you don’t make at least 10 trades per month.

The two available trading platforms are both fantastic. If you consider yourself an active trader who takes your daily trading seriously then the St George Directshares Australia pro platform is going to be your best option. If you think you aren’t going to be making more than 10 trades a month then you can avoid any subscription fees by using the standard trading platform.

Funding your St George Directshares Australia is another section of the site where the broker is not expressly clear on your options. With that being said, we think it’s safe to assume that in order to fund your account you will need to use your actual St George Directshares Australia St George Directshares Australia bank account or an account with the other two banks we mentioned.

So, what does this mean? Well, you should be able to top up your trading account funds easily as you are already connected with one of the accepted banks before you can actually create your account. So, it should be relatively easy to top up your St George Directshares Australia bank account if you don’t have all that money funds on there or if you don’t use it as your main bank account. This would mean that your deposits options would include every other accepted payment method in Australia.

We recommend getting in touch with the customer support team over at St George Directshares Australia to clear this up if you plan on making a deposit into your trading account. For a broker with more clear cut payment methods, we suggest taking a look at our Easy Markets review or our Markets review.

After scouring through the St George Directshares Australia platform we found that there were a few different ways for you to contact their support team. This included an email address and a telephone number for the trading platform customer support team. It needs to be specified because there are  a number of different telephone numbers to sieve through for each section of the banking services.

We found that the response to our email took a good couple of hours before we heard back from anyone. The question we needed answered was fairly simple as well so this didn’t do wonders for our St George Directshares rating. Aside from that, the email response was professional and they did ultimately answer our question.

We had a more pleasant experience when we called the customer support team as they were friendly and welcoming. All in all, we found the technical support staff to be positive, efficient and most importantly, knowledgeable. This swung our St George Directshares rating back around.

The only real disappointment we had with the customer support service was that it lacked a live chat feature. Sure, you can contact the support team through social media channels but from our experience. There is no better way to have your questions answered or your problem resolved than a live chat feature. We would love to see St George Directshares Australia add a live chat feature to their site in the near future as this would round off what is already a high-quality customer service.

St George Directshares has passed all the necessary tests to operate a legal online trading platform alongside their already stellar banking service. We found that they are regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) so you can rest easy if you were worried about any St George Directshares scam happening. The fact that they are also one of Australia’s major banks should also help allay any of your fears about St George Directshares being safe to use.

We also found that St George Directshares keeps all client funds for the online trading platform in a separate trust account. This ensures the safety of your capital and that St George Directshares will never use it to cover debts or any  other payment that they have incurred themselves. They are, however, within their rights to keep any interest accrued from the trust account. Check out our OctaFx review to see how they protect your funds in comparison to St George Direct shares.