Mercantile of St. Louis Readies On-Line Trading

Mercantile Bancorp. said it plans to roll out on-line trading to its discount brokerage customers in May.

The St. Louis banking company has roughly 7,000 discount brokerage customers in its Infinet and Bruno Stolze units, said Gail H. Partain, president of Mercantile Investment Services.

Full-service clients will not have access to on-line trading, Ms. Partain said. But Mercantile will launch an on-line information service for its full-service brokerage customers by the end of this quarter, she said.

Mercantile is not trying to take on the nonbank behemoths of on-line brokerage, Ms. Partain said.

"We're not going to be competitively priced," she said. "We need to have it available; there's a segment of our customer base that wants it."

Ms. Partain said the banking company has yet to work out a pricing schedule for the service.

Mercantile, a $35.8 billion-asset company, bought Bruno Stolze & Co., a local discount brokerage operation, last year.

It is working to merge its own Infinet unit with Bruno Stolze, Ms. Partain said.