My day of visiting the Fidelity campus in Boston and what vision and vibe I experienced

Brooke’s Note: Boston is a place where people have a rich inner life, by necessity. Bostonians spend a half the year immersed in a winter that hits early, and nags late. When spring comes, it’s basically summer and steamy humidity creates a fresh challenge. The sports teams in Boston are good but prone to tragic season endings — the Bruins being the latest casualty. All of this works on Boston business people who are both motivated to compete but a little distrustful of the barbarians in other states who have been softened by temperate weather and sports teams that win and lose with fewer Shakespearean twists. Fidelity physically and psychologically drapes itself over Boston, and vice-versa, and its mindset of both the hidebound and boundlessness are in evidence. Both mindsets have their place, and Fidelity is clearly looking to each — in its right measure.

My first impression of meeting Fidelity Investments on Tuesday was that maybe I was in the wrong place. The lobby at 315 Summer St. is airy, high-ceilinged, adorned by bright modern art and nobody engaged in conversations qualified in my mind as a dour New Englander. Add to that where I found this lobby — perilously close to South Boston, an area of Beantown that blue-blooded New England financial firms viewed a little like Wall Streeters view Flatbush Avenue.

When last I visited Fidelity, it was the early 2000s and I was at that time not disappointed in my preconception of what I would encounter upon arrival. I was drawn into a mid-rise classic downtown building of ash-gray corridors manned by people with ashen visages (it was winter) wearing ash-gray suits (I exaggerate, but you get the idea.) I was taken to another building to interview Jay Lanigan, a red-faced man who was head of the RIA business at the time. On another trip I did a formal Q&A for InvestmentNews with Ellyn McColgan, a senior executive who pulled levers. She questioned the very importance of financial advisors.

“We don’t promote the adviser as the first line of defense,” McColgan said in the 2003 interview. “Every time you introduce someone to an intermediary, there’s a fee, and we’re deeply rooted in no fees.”

That was then.

Property purge

In 2013, all of these Fidelity impressions have been summarily supplanted. Different lobes of the Fidelity brain — especially those related to financial advisors — are ostensibly being connected by new neural pathways that were summed up in Wednesday’s article about the company. See: Fidelity reorganizes its advisor business and extrudes a custody unit aimed at outsourcers, roll-ups and TAMPs.

Many of the kinds of Fidelity buildings that harbored the kind of offices that would have made Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge feel right at home. are now in fact being sold. The real estate purge includes four contiguous properties: 82 Devonshire St./35 Congress St., 68 Devonshire St., 15 Congress St. and 19 Congress St., and a 2,116-square-foot parcel at 54 Devonshire St.

When you see your firm name
in lights at Fidelity’s $2.5-billion technology
laboratory, it’s fun and flattering.

Many of the employees in these buildings are being moved to North Carolina to a land of giveaway real estate, short elevator rides and parking lots to make WalMart jealous. And many employees, of course, may not want to give up Boston, so new employees, who can buy shelter in dirt-cheap Carolina subdivisions, can be hired for favorable wages. At least that’s what I picture down in the Research Triangle.

Fidelity tech center

My interviews all took place in a conference room that is part of The Fidelity Center of Applied Technology. After getting the hardcore strategic thoughts from Mike Durbin, president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services, and Sanjiv Mirchandani, president of National Financial Services LLC, I interviewed Ed O’Brien, who heads all the WealthCentral and StreetScape efforts. He was piped in from Rhode Island for a hyper-realistic encounter by screen.

The Fidelity Center of Applied Technology is obviously a great place to receive a reporter from California steeped in the idea that forward-leaning companies belong in campus-like atmospheres with playful overtones. The FCAT is the place where Fidelity claims to faithfully pour $2.5 billion annually into its technology budget. My tour reminded me of a childhood visit to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, where playful gee-whiz uses of technology — like robots and 3-D printers — are interspersed with spots of more immediate importance. One of them was a room where clients, consumers or advisors, are put and where engineers can watch them through glass to see how they interact with technology. I was also shown technology that demonstrated the counterintuitive ways that a person’s eyes take in information on a website.

Ed O’Brien made a virtual appearance
and explained FCAT’s power: "I don’t
worry about the evolving browser technology
— Chrome versus Safari.

But the grander purpose of this laboratory is simply to allow engineers like Ed O’Brien to be liberated from following and vetting all the general technology that might be fed into more specific applications. “I don’t worry about the evolving browser technology — Chrome versus Safari,” he says. “It allows me to focus more on the advisor channel I service and use the latest technology development tools.

This general technology support has become critical because the development cycle keeps shrinking. “It was five to seven years and now we’re measuring it in months.”

Taking meetings

One good example of how FCAT gave FIWS a jump on the custody field, O’Brien adds, is in the area of mobile computing. One of Fidelity’s big technology initiatives is to make mobile and web-based use of WealthCentral essentially one world. “You learn once and don’t have to worry about whether it’s an app.” See: Fidelity slips in ahead of Pershing on Google phones with WealthCentral for Android.

After meeting with O’Brien, I was also able to spend time with Bob Oros, national sales chief of Fidelity, and Trevor Norton, senior vice president, multifamily-office services, who helps win big advisors by bringing family office capabilities — with in-house capital markets services at the forefront — to a broader RIA audience. Typically these are RIAs whose clients have $25 million or more to invest.

Bob Oros came by to chat.
He still expresses respect for his
Schwab alma mater but speaks of
having weapons to serve a broader
range of prospects at Fidelity.

Oros still expresses respect for his Schwab Advisor Services alma mater but speaks of having weapons to serve a broader range of prospects at Fidelity — especially relating to family-office services and hybrid services. See: Fidelity hires Bob Oros as its new RIA sales chief.

“There’s virtually never a situation where we don’t have an option [for advisors],” he says. “That’s what’s blown me away in 18 months.”

I was toured on the FCAT by Al Lee, senior project manager for the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology. I was told that Lee has a three-dimensional business card with a title of mad scientist. He effectively measured my patience for tours and let me know that Fidelity is seeing itself more and more as a technology company. Lee struck me as somebody that Google might want to poach.

So, yes, the emerging Abigail Johnson era — inside and outside — is in evidence at Fidelity. One employee told me off the record that he was not privy to all that happens in the high corporate suites but that he and his colleagues are pretty clear that when her jurisdiction enlarges internally, changes — an opening of internal architecture — seem to follow apace. And that those units take a more outward-facing posture toward the outside world. See: Abby Johnson wins RIA respect by articulating her bold vision for Fidelity’s future at the company’s Executive Forum.

Al Lee personifies a Fidelity determination
to straddle humans and the software
and hardware that serves them. Here
he stands with an early-stage robot.

I hope the whole company doesn’t move to North Carolina so that I can continue to swing through Boston from time to time on my way to visit family in Maine. But in general, the company seems to be taking an interesting, more modern direction, faster than I might have gleaned from where I typically sit in San Francisco, soaking up the good weather.