BM: Are millennial customers different, or are they just young?
AJ: It’s probably some of both. They expect a digital experience. They expect it to be really easy. We designed our robo-offering, Fidelity Go, to have six questions, because we decided that was the maximum that they would be willing to tolerate. I think there is more pressure on millennials to think about saving.
KM: That’s pushing the entire industry to make the whole investment experience easier. They’re the first users and then the rest of the world catches up. We design things for millennials and then calibrate to older people.
BM: I can remember your father, Abby, was very into computer stuff when people really had only the dimmest idea of what computers were. Do you spend a lot on technology?
AJ: Broadly, technology is what makes it possible for us to charge less and offer more service every year, which is basically the trend in the industry. We looked at other very large direct-to-consumer retail digital businesses to say, “If that’s their experience in the rest of their personal life, how can we replicate that here?”
There’s new technology now at pretty much every level of the stack. We’re on a mission, particularly in PI [personal investing] but elsewhere as well, to offer a digital experience for every service capability.
At the other end of the spectrum, our industry is still running on a lot of mainframe and other vintage technology. That is for a good reason. It’s very well established, it’s very reliable—everybody’s very risk-averse on that front for a good reason. We’re now entering a world where there are other technologies that potentially could take the place of that.
BM: How does Fidelity balance data privacy with trying to create a frictionless experience?
KM: First of all, we never sell any data that we get, and we don’t allow vendors to—if they work with us—take it for any other purpose either.
We use data in service of the customer. If we know that a customer has certain needs, we should be proactive in asking them about X, Y, or Z based on some life event coming up. Our experience should be better for an individual consumer than your experience on Netflix.