Zecco Holdings announced today that veteran online brokerage executive and current Chief Information Officer Michael Raneri will become the company's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) as of January 1st, 2010.
Current CEO Jeroen Veth intends to assume a position on the Zecco Supervisory Board.
"I am extremely pleased to announce this choice," said Mr. Veth. "Since we founded Zecco in 2006, we've been looking for the person who can take Zecco to the next stage of growth. Michael Raneri, with his deep experience in online financial services and high-growth companies, is really the perfect candidate to take Zecco to that next level."
Mr. Raneri has been CIO of Zecco since May 2008 and successfully rebuilt the infrastructure and software for Zecco's online experience to support its growing community of users. He has also been an active member of Zecco's Board of Directors from 2006 to 2008.
"I feel privileged to take on my new role and am very excited about the opportunity to help Zecco serve the self-directed investor," said Raneri. "Jeroen built an amazing online brokerage firm from concept to over 170,000 brokerage accounts in just over 3 years."
Zecco Trading has realized a 72% year-over-year increase in accounts, and the Zecco financial community now has over 300,000 members.
Mr. Raneri added, "My goal is to build upon our foundation of success, while putting a major emphasis on product and service improvements. Our customers will benefit from a full pipeline of trading platform enhancements that will be introduced throughout 2010. We will also redouble the investments in customer service that Jeroen initiated. In fact, we are already seeing the fruits of that investment in terms of 48% lower wait times and a 28% increase in our customer satisfaction scores."*
A recognized pioneer in electronic brokerage, Mr. Raneri is also a leader in deploying Web 2.0 technologies. As the SVP of Integrated Client Experiences at Charles Schwab, he led many of the initiatives that fueled the company's rapid growth on the Internet. He led the online tools and content initiatives for the launch of Schwab.com and e.Schwab, as well as the facilitation of Schwab Private Client. In addition, Mr. Raneri served as CEO of MeeVee.com, a TV guide and video search website.