Fidelity Investments Aligns Clearing and Custody Units

Fidelity Institutional announced plans to align its clearing and custody units, while the wider firm will establish a new technology group to create digital solutions across the Fidelity enterprise.

Fidelity Institutional is the division of Fidelity Investments that provides clearing, custody and investment management products to registered investment advisers (RIAs) and broker/dealers. Moving forward, Fidelity says the clearing and custody units will be unified under a single leader—Sanjiv Mirchandani, appointed president of Fidelity Clearing and Custody.

“Combining our clearing and custody organizations into one unit under a single leader helps us deliver the best solutions for our clients and is the next logical step in the process that we started several years ago,” suggests Gerard McGraw, president of Fidelity Institutional.

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In conjunction with that change, Fidelity also announced the creation of a new organization, Fidelity Wealth Technologies, a group that will drive and deliver digital solutions across the Fidelity enterprise and throughout the financial advice industry. Michael Durbin becomes president of the new Fidelity Wealth Technologies group.

Mirchandani is currently the president of Fidelity’s National Financial, while Durbin is currently president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services. Fidelity says the creation of the new leadership roles is part of a long-term strategy to recognize the growing, emerging and converging business models in the financial advice industry—and to organize the clearing and custody units to better serve clients.

In the last five years, Fidelity has aligned several core functions across the clearing and custody businesses, including the client experience team, the product group and the platform technology team. In July 2013, the business was further realigned around several core client segments: banks and broker/dealers are served under National Financial and RIAs and recordkeepers are served under Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services.

Mirchandani will continue to report to McGraw, and Durbin will report to Michael Wilens, president of Fidelity Enterprise Services. 

Hartford Funds Planning NextShares ETF Lineup

Hartford Funds says it has entered into a preliminary agreement with Navigate Fund Solutions LLC to support the launch of a new family of NextShares exchange-traded managed funds.

James Davey, president of Hartford Funds, says the NextShares fund family will have the potential to help financial advisers enable their clients to reach long-term financial goals.

NextShares are a new type of exchange-traded product, according to Hartford Funds and Navigate Fund Solutions, a subsidiary of Eaton Eaton Vance Corp. The funds are designed to provide investors with potentially better performance and enhanced tax efficiency by leveraging the best features of actively managed mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). 

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“Like active mutual funds, NextShares seek to outperform their benchmark index and peer funds based on their manager’s investment insights and research judgments,” Hartford says. “Like ETFs, NextShares will utilize an exchange-traded structure with built-in cost and tax advantages.”

Compared to actively managed ETFs, Hartford says NextShares will offer the potential benefits of protecting the confidentiality of fund trading information and providing trading cost transparency to fund investors. 

Navigate is a wholly owned subsidiary of Eaton Vance Corp. formed to develop and commercialize NextShares. The company won Securities and Exchange Commission approval in 2014 to offer “exchange-traded mutual funds” that deliver nontransparent actively managed investment strategies as exchange-traded funds. The funds are unique for ETFs because they are structured in a way that allows investment managers to keep their holdings secret for months at a time.

More information is at www.nextshares.com.

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