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Retirement Planning > Retirement Investing

Fidelity Rolls Out New Website for Retirement Advisors and Consultants

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Fidelity Investments on Thursday announced a new website for retirement advisors and consultants who manage workplace plans with the firm.

Called FidelityConnect, it provides advisors with a complete book-of-business snapshot of all their defined contribution plans administered by Fidelity, and improves on plan-level analytics, the firm said in its announcement.

Fidelity said the new service was being piloted with several of its advisor clients, and would likely be fully available during the first quarter of 2017.

Customer Input

Fidelity included customers in the development of FidelityConnect.

The firm’s User Experience Design team met with some 150 retirement advisors to learn how much time they spent researching investments, compiling reports and navigating the existing site.

“We sat with advisors in our labs and in the field to develop a shared vision for what FidelityConnect could help them achieve,” Heather Wingfield, Fidelity’s principal information architect and FidelityConnect’s design leader, said in the statement.

Wingfield, whose background is in human-computer interaction and design, built screen prototypes in tandem with advisors.

 “The collaboration is essential,” she said. “Together, we uncovered what advisors need at their fingertips, and continued to refine the site to improve the user experience.”

Fidelity noted that new regulations from the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule may increase pressure on advisors’ time with retirement plan clients.

“The new DOL rule may increase the workload on already busy advisors,” Tom Woods, a senior vice president at Fidelity Investments, said in the statement.

“FidelityConnect promises retirement advisors improved efficiency, insights and oversight to help them better service their clients.”

Click to see the full screenshot. Source: Fidelity

A Look Inside

The advisors’ input prompted Fidelity to design a personalized executive summary with three tabs: plans, investments and compensation. The goal was to give advisors instant analysis of all their plans with Fidelity, with the ability to drill down for details.

Behind the homepage is plan-level information. Advisors can view and evaluate individual plan statistics and design, investments held, compensation and contact information for sponsor clients.

These pages, Fidelity said, leverage its Executive Insights to offer advisors the same intelligence and benchmarking from which sponsors currently benefit.

With one or two clicks, an advisor can see all the plans and participants invested in a single fund across their book of business, as well as their performance and assets.

“Spending our time pulling reports or looking for information doesn’t add value,” Dave Westra, a partner at MRA Associates in Phoenix and a collaborator with the design team, said in the statement.

“FidelityConnect is as user friendly for advisors as the company’s website is for 401(k) participants.”


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