Initial Experience with the EasyEquities Platform
When we first used EasyEquities, we were puzzled that we could not find transaction confirmations anywhere within the platform. There was a Transaction History section, but it only displayed summaries of recent activity. We eventually realised that the trade notification email is, in fact, the transaction confirmation. However, it is an email and it omits two crucial identifiers: the listing symbol (known as the alpha code on the JSE) and the ISIN. Instead, only the security description is provided.
Security descriptions are intended for humans, not as unique identifiers. Similar instruments may have very similar descriptions, and descriptions can change over time. Reliable reconciliation requires stable identifiers. The ‘Transaction History’ screen does not help much either: it has no symbol and no ISIN.
Without stable identifiers, it becomes difficult to reconcile transactions to positions, compare records between systems, or maintain the necessary records over long periods of time for capital gains calculations.
What Does It Take to Reconstruct an Accurate Transaction History?
The approach we have taken is to save each email as an .eml file. We then wrote our own code to interrogate that format, decode the Base64 content, navigate the nested HTML, and extract the data from the email. Unexpectedly, the Buy/Sell indicator is embedded within an image, making automated extraction more difficult, but not impossible! Then, to resolve the missing data, we maintain a list of all names/descriptions available at the JSE and have developed reasonably sophisticated fuzzy-matching logic to reconcile abbreviations and naming differences in order to infer the listing symbol and ISIN. That is a very, very painful way to access the transaction confirmation and enrich it with data it really should have had. We have real data friction here!
What about the Transaction History screen?
As noted above, there is a Transaction History screen. You can only download the last year’s transactions, but the transaction record is just a summary; it is missing both the listing symbol and ISIN. The fees are not attached to the transaction itself, making it difficult to reliably reconstruct the economic details of a trade. Instead, they appear as separate nearby entries with no linking identifier that allows them to be reliably associated with the corresponding trade. This is not particularly useful for accurate record-keeping.
Transaction Confirmations Are Records, Not Notifications
The format of the transaction confirmation is also worth considering. Transactions may remain relevant for tax and audit purposes many years after they occur. A transaction executed today may still form part of the cost base calculation for a disposal many years in the future.
If a capital gains tax calculation is challenged by a tax authority, what exactly is an investor expected to provide as supporting evidence—a collection of old .eml files? In practice, many investors would likely end up printing those emails (if they still have them) to PDF in order to create a more durable record.
Email is an effective notification mechanism, but it is a poor long-term record-keeping format. Emails can be deleted both accidentally and deliberately by retention policies. The email may even belong to an employer if a work email address is used. The transaction confirmation document should be available within the platform and remain available for the lifetime of the account.
What do other platforms do?
Many brokers provide transaction confirmations as PDFs accessible from within the platform. These confirmations usually include the listing symbol and often the ISIN. However, machine-readable transaction history remains an area where the industry could improve significantly. Rather than building increasingly complex transaction viewers, brokers should focus on providing complete, well-identified data in simple downloadable formats.
What should EasyEquities do?
We have highlighted the data friction on the EasyEquities platform, not because we want to criticise EasyEquities for the sake of criticism, but because we genuinely want the platform to succeed. The innovations they have brought to the South African market are superb. Precisely because of that, we believe it should aim to set the standard for data transparency. The following steps would be welcome:
- Immediately solve the transaction-confirmation problem by generating a PDF confirmation containing both the listing symbol and the ISIN. Until a platform document store is ready, send it by email.
- Introduce a document store where confirmations can be accessed, likely organised by account and possibly by tax year, with sensible lexicographical file names.
- Introduce standard machine-readable transaction-history files for each tax year, as described below.
- Gradually deprecate the existing Transaction History screen.
Standard Annual Tax Year Transaction History Files
Most broker platforms have some form of transaction history viewer, with a variety of filter options. They have wasted time and resources building inadequate screens with some basic data analysis functionality, yet they fail to produce the data that is actually needed, notably the listing symbol and the ISIN. The broker should focus on delivering data in a good machine-readable format as a set of standard files, with data over standard fixed periods, rather than interactive reports. The natural length of the period can be debated, but a calendar year or tax year seems about right. The data should be designed for machines rather than presented to humans. Do not include thousands separators in decimal values or place currency symbols or codes in the same field as the amount. Use one plain decimal column and a separate currency column. The human-readable presentation already exists in the transaction-confirmation PDF. The transaction history file should be treated as data, not as a report for humans to read.
Why focus on a hard-coded time period, a single tax year?
Fixing the time period removes the need for querying. Once the period ends, the file becomes immutable and can simply be downloaded from a document store. Filtering and presentation can then be performed in the investor’s preferred analysis tool. One year of trades for a regular investor may contain fewer than 240 records—for example, 20 securities with approximately one trade per month in each. Such a file is tiny and creates no technical difficulty to generate or consume. Moreover, the broker has to produce a variety of reports after the tax year anyway. This can be added to that schedule of tasks. Investors can get a very quick view of the capital gains events: just select the tax year file and filter to select the sell transactions. There is still one active period, the current tax year, but even that does not need to query the production system during trading hours. It can be generated as an end-of-day process and be ready the following morning. This turns what would otherwise be a reporting query into a simple file download. The broker can focus on producing high-quality data rather than maintaining interactive reporting infrastructure. Providing data files for standard time windows is much simpler to implement, yet still delivers excellent transaction-history functionality. With this approach, EasyEquities could leapfrog ahead of competitors in delivering great Transaction History functionality.
Conclusion
EasyEquities has transformed retail investing in South Africa. For that, it deserves credit. The next step is to make the platform’s records more accessible and easier to verify.
Transparency is not merely about access to information. It is about verifiability. When investors can trace a reported position back to the transactions that created it, they gain confidence that the records are complete and accurate. Trust is strongest when it can be supported by evidence.
By focusing on accurate transaction confirmations and annual machine-readable transaction files, EasyEquities could provide one of the most transparent transaction reporting experiences available to retail investors anywhere in the world, and this could be achieved with surprisingly little effort or complexity.