Cyber brokers set up real branches Embracing old-fashioned branches

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In another sign the Internet is just another way to sell stuff, one of the nation's biggest online stockbrokers is setting up old-fashioned branch offices.

CSFB Direct has opened branches in recent weeks in New York, Atlanta, Boca Raton, Fla., Chicago - and in Narberth, convenient to the firm's Main Line clientele.

Despite the Nasdaq stock market sell-off, CSFB Direct says it continues to attract online customers - the kind of people brokerages like because they tend to be wealthier than the average investor, and they trade a lot.

But it turns out that most of the people who buy and sell stocks online also "appreciate bricks and mortar and a physical presence," said Blake D'Arcy, chief executive officer of CSFB Direct (formerly DLJ Direct), a unit of multinational Credit Suisse First Boston Inc.

CSFB isn't the only new-age financial company to learn this lesson.

Online investment bank W.R. Hambrecht & Co. recently opened its first branch, in Berwyn; "branchless" ING Direct Bank of Wilmington is opening customer "cafes" in Center City and Manhattan; and First Union Corp. had to put human managers back into its branches after massive complaints met its 1999 attempt to computerize customer service.

But don't branches defeat the purpose of a low-overhead, low-price online trading outfit?

"Online anything has not been inexpensive from a marketing standpoint," D'Arcy said. "We view these as marketing expenses."

In fact, CSFB has decided that opening branches is a more efficient way to win new customers than, say, advertising on cable television: "Instead of putting more money at CNBC, we put it into these types of facilities" staffed by live brokers and other professionals.

With Credit Card Center, the Philadelphia-based automatic-teller-machine supplier, slipping farther behind on its debts, creditors are looking for someone else to sue.

"We will look at their relationships with financing companies," said Brian L. Clobes, an attorney with Center City-based Miller Faucher & Cafferty, who in May filed a class-action complaint on behalf of University City's Allegro Pizza and other merchants who leased ATMs through CCC, but say the company's promised rebate checks have bounced.

The Allegro case is the latest in a series filed by customers and vendors against CCC, whose owner, Andy Kollok, and lawyer, Tom Pfender, did not return calls.