Fidelity’s New Robo Ups Ante for Advisors
After launching its robo for retail investors last summer, Fidelity Investments is forging ahead on a revamped technology platform for advisors. By mid-year, the asset manager and financial services custodian expects to offer its 3,000-plus customer base of RIAs and brokerages a whole new set of online tools to manage client portfolios.
“We’re making some important changes here – this is a completely different platform from our retail (Fidelity Go) service and comes with several new features,” says Gary Gallagher, head of Fidelity Institutional’s digital-advice services group.
The revisions are part of a broader effort to refresh Fidelity’s entire Wealthscape platform – the custodian’s general “gateway” for advisors to tap into a range of different digital account management and client reporting features.
“Taken as a whole, our technology platform is being designed so that advisors have the option to seamlessly transition their online clients at a later date to become full-service customers,” Gallagher says.
David Edwards, president of Heron Financial Group, counts himself as one long-time Fidelity customer who is very interested in the AMP upgrade.
“One of the nice features of their new robo is that we’d be able to use it to plug and play into our core eMoney financial planning software,” says the New York-based advisor, whose firm manages $295 million.
Edwards, though, observes that as many as 20 different vendors are offering robos that in various forms could be adopted for institutional purposes.
One such robo he’s considering is powered by Riskalyze. This spring the developer of investment-risk-assessment software is planning to launch a new generation of its original Autopilot robo package.
