Advisors now have another way to communicate with peers at their firms following the launch of a new platform by Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday.

The platform, called “Finteract,” is a free, online, peer-to-peer community designed to increase the ways advisors and their staffs can talk with one another, Fidelity said.

The platform is open to any advisors and their staff. It can be accessed at https://finteract.net/signup and requires advisors to enter some personal and professional information. Once the applicant submits the information, it will be reviewed by a community manager, who will reply to the applicant in one to two business days.

“Sometimes it can be lonely being an advisor. We wanted to complement the other types of platforms to provide a community where advisors and their staffs can connect with each other and learn from their peers,” said Anand Sekhar, vice president of practice management and consulting at Fidelity, in an interview.

“For instance, there was a book published recently on private equity, and I asked if those on the platform thought private equity” would be advantageous to the market and to clients. “It sparked a good conversation,” Sekhar said.

Nearly half of advisors in a Fidelity research effort (47%) said they aren’t happy with the number and types of communities currently available to them. One-third of those surveyed added that they are looking for a way to connect more with advisors outside their firms, while one in five of them showed interest in joining a new or different dedicated advisor community. (The data was collected for a 2021 digital advisor community survey performed by Fidelity and was based on responses from 408 advisors.)

The Finteract platform was designed as a non-commercial community that allows advisors to engage with one another without sales pitches. Members will be vetted by Fidelity to ensure they are part of the financial industry, Sekhar said.

The platform will accept members who are advisors and also back-office staff. Sixty percent of advisors said they share responsibilities related to selecting technology and managing operations for their staff, therefore “it is particularly important to bring these groups together for shared learning and development,” Fidelity said.

Fidelity already has a non-commercial, peer-to-peer network of single-family office executives called Forge.