TD Ameritrade Moves One Step Closer Towards Making Trading Through Your Car Possible

If you’ve ever wanted to execute a trade via the voice control in your car, well, you can’t. At least not yet. But that could be a reality soon.

TD Ameritrade AMTD announced Monday several new integrations that will provide access to real-time quotes, portfolio information, and content from the TDA Network via Apple Inc AAPL CarPlay, Alphabet Inc’s GOOG GOOGL Android Auto and Amazon.com Inc’s AMZN Echo Auto.

The move to vehicles marks the latest technological frontier for the retail brokerage, which has also developed chatbots for social media, text-to-trade functionality for Apple Business Chat and voice-activated trading through Alexa.

What To Know

“You’ve got us on your desktop; you’ve got us on our mobile app; you’ve got us through messaging platforms like Facebook and Apple Business Chat; you’ve got us through your in-home speakers with Alexa; and now you’ve also got us on the go in your car where, whether we like it or not, as Americans we spend a great deal of quality time,” Sunayna Tuteja, TD Ameritrade’s head of strategic partnerships and emerging technologies, told Benzinga.

A survey from the AAA Foundation found that U.S. drivers spend an average of 51 minutes per day behind the wheel, a 6% increase from 2014.

The integration with Android Auto and Echo Auto will allow drivers to use voice commands to see how their portfolio is doing, get market performance updates, real-time quotes of individual stocks, and news from TD Ameritrade Network. Those using Apple CarPlay will only have access to the TD Ameritrade Network right now.

“Each ecosystem has their own nuances so we wanted to work within that framework,” said Tuteja.

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Trading Through Your Car Could Become Possible Next Year

Though the ability to trade through a voice prompt in your car doesn’t exist yet, Tuteja said we’re not too far from that becoming a reality as cars become more autonomous. It’s not impossible, she said, that in-car trading could be introduced as soon as 2020.

“As cars are becoming more computerized and technology becomes more digitized, I think we can start to add more of the transactional capabilities,” she said. “I would not put trading out of the realm within a year. The technology needs to mature, but it happens very quickly. We did that with Alexa, where we started with quotes and within a few months we could layer in trading.

“Just getting in-vehicle, this has been months of heavy lifting. We want to be very cognizant of safety and security. But as cars get more towards the autonomous phase, as drivers we get more untethered, and that changes things.”

Who knows, maybe the phrase “I sold my Ford through the Apple in my Tesla” won’t be so crazy in 12 months.