Fidelity Investments' Full View has found favor with investors, gathering 20,000 customers since Christmas. The service is partnership with Yodlee.

The aggregation service draws account information from different sources, allowing easy access to holdings and, soon, to analytical tools. Accounts can include other mutual funds, banks, credit cards, frequent fliers miles, and even brokerage accounts. However, all accounts must be accessible by user id and password over the internet.

"The aim of the product is customer convenience," said James Griffin, spokesman for Fidelity.

Nonetheless, Griffin admitted that Fidelity seeks to retain customers and attract more of their money through the new services. An important element of the aggregation which will come into play later this year is portfolio planning. Fidelity has enhanced its existing portfolio planner for use with the collected information.

"It will prepopulate all the fields so, as long as it's aggregated on the Fidelity site, it'll pull all that data in and prepopulate it," he explained. "It gives you a picture of where you are in a particular industry or sector by using the product to see through the funds."

In some cases, Fidelity has access to information on the customers' other accounts.

"If the customer wants us to send them information about products and services from Fidelity based on what they have at other firms, then they have to tell us that," Griffin said.

Does Fidelity still have access to the information even when the investor receives no literature? Griffin was unsure, but certainly the data, even anonymously, would be valuable.

Griffin suspected that a similar aggregation function will surface on the advisor side. "I think that there is some work going on for the institutional product group, but it's a bit of a separate organization."

 

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