Practicing Safe Stocks

Next year, some of the nation’s largest companies plan to stop automatically issuing embossed certificates to investors that declare their ownership of stock in a corporation.

Stock ownership instead would give way to the Computer Age and be recorded electronically by the company. Investors would get stock certificates only by special request.

This electronic record-keeping is part of an international effort to increase the safety of stock markets by speeding up the time it takes to record purchases and sales of stock in publicly traded companies.

James Volpe, vice president of First Chicago Trust Co. and the man who helped devise the system, said it will shave two days off the one or two weeks it now can take before investors get confirmation of a share transaction.