American Savings Bank priced its initial public offering at $16 per share and immediately converted the New York Stock Exchange trading floor into a working savings branch, complete with teller windows between the specialist posts and a coin-counting machine where the opening bell used to hang.
Under the new floor rules, every trader must open a passbook savings account before the bell and deposit at least one paycheck stub per session. Bank staff in green visors now circulate through the crowd with deposit slips, and the exchange has replaced its closing auction with a mandatory monthly statement review conducted aloud by the head of the floor.
«We are a savings bank,» said a bank vice president overseeing the conversion. «If you want to trade, you will first learn to save. The two are not in conflict. They are sequential.»
By the second day, the floor had installed a drive-through window for brokers who refused to leave their booths, and the bank had begun issuing toaster ovens to anyone maintaining a balance above the minimum. Traders who failed to make a deposit were escorted to a folding table near the luncheonette and asked to reconsider their relationship with compound interest.
The bank now plans to expand the model to other exchanges, starting with a night-depository slot cut into the façade of the Nasdaq MarketSite.