Wall St Share Ownership
When you purchase shares through Stake, you own the shares. However, the way share ownership works in the U.S. is a little different compared to Australian equities: most brokers and investing platforms (including Stake) operate on a custodian model.
The custodian ownership model means that your shares are held on your behalf by a trusted custodian. Our U.S. broker-dealer, DriveWealth, manages the books and records nominating your shares as being in your name, and appoints a custodian (Royal Bank of Canada) to hold your shares for you. When you invest with Stake, your funds go directly to DriveWealth via our regulated FX partner, Airwallex. Find more information about Stake’s partners here.
Protection
Our U.S. partner DriveWealth, LLC is a broker-dealer registered with FINRA (U.S. regulator) and a member of SIPC, which protects Stake investors who own U.S. securities for up to US$500,000 (including US$250,000 for claims for cash). With an account at a brokerage firm that is a member of SIPC, your assets are protected whether you’re a U.S. citizen or not. You can read more about SIPC on their website.
Please note that SIPC does not protect against the decline in the value of your securities. SIPC gets involved when a brokerage firm fails and SIPC appoints a trustee to manage the liquidation of the firm for the protection of customers.
In the unlikely event of Stake closing, you would still have access to all your cash and securities via DriveWealth, Velox Clearing, and Citibank.
Account Security
To avoid unauthorised access to your account, you can enable additional security measures such as two-factor authentication (2FA) in your account settings. With 2FA, to perform certain actions you’ll need a verification code sent to your phone, via SMS or a third-party app like Google Authenticator or Authy. For the Stake app, you can also enable your phone’s biometric authentication or set up a numeric passcode.
Data
We work to meet the highest standards of privacy regimes in Australia and all the markets we operate. As we are also a UK-regulated firm, we adhere to a privacy policy that is set out in accordance with the UK GDPR.
In terms of storing data, we encrypt and store all your data securely with third-party data storage providers, including AWS, for example.
More information is available in our Privacy Policy.
