OnStar To Open Stock Trading Behind The Wheel

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February 13, 2001 (4:31 PM EST)

OnStar To Open Stock Trading Behind The Wheel

What started as an advanced vehicle navigation and safety system is being enhanced to let skittish investors check stock quotes and eventually trade stocks while driving.

OnStar, a General Motors Corp. subsidiary, on Tuesday formed an alliance with financial services firm Fidelity Investments to deliver content from its wireless website to specially equipped autos that GM is selling in the Northeast.

The enhancement is the Virtual Advisor, an in-vehicle speech-recognition system capable of responding to spoken commands by establishing wireless connections to the content source, retrieving the desired data, and reading it back to the driver—typically over the car's sound system.

Users will pay only for the 18- to 30-cents-per-minute wireless call charge, which includes roaming and long distance. Those who trade stocks using OnStar will pay the going rate for stock trades.

OnStar may also charge Fidelity sponsorship and stock-trade transaction fees, but it has no plans to charge customers for the service, OnStar president Chet Huber said.

"We want to deal with customers any time and any place," said Bob Reynolds, Fidelity's chief operating officer, adding that 88 percent of the company's transactions are already handled over the Web or wireless devices.

Execs from both companies say there's a big demand for the service and that it's safe to use while driving.

The companies say they're looking at a number of ways to secure the wireless transmission of sensitive financial data, ranging from elliptical curve cryptography to several unspecified types of encryption.

Support for stock trading will start in midsummer.

Neither vendor would estimate how long it will take to make a stock trade with the in-vehicle system.

"OnStar's been a huge success to date because of its navigational and safety capabilities, but I'm not sure what I see as a noncritical capability of getting stock quotes and trading stocks will really advance things," said Daniel Briere, CEO of consulting firm TeleChoice, Oklahoma City.