In a move designed to capture business from RIAs looking to switch custodians, Fidelity Investments is initiating a sweeping series of prices reductions for fees, services and products associated with its custodial services platform.
All price reductions begin on October 1. Depending on the service or product, the discounts are available for nine months ending June 30 of next year or, for its Wealth Central platform, through 2011.
On the Wealth Central platform, Fidelity is offering a 10% to 35% price reduction on annual service fees for its Oracle Customer Relationship Management application as well as discounts of up to 50% for Advent's APX-hosted multicustodial platform. The latter price reductions are available through 2011.
On the product front, Fidelity is waiving annual position fees for all new alternative investment accounts. Additionally, it is waiving annual trustee fees for all new personal trust accounts and annual custody fees for new accounts opened in its managed account supermarket.
For the nine months beginning October 1, Fidelity will eliminate commissions on electronic equity and option trades and transfer of account fees for all new to Fidelity relationships.
Advisors will be able to decide whether they want to cherrypick various parts of the discount program or use them on an end-to-end basis, according to Mike Durbin, president of Fidelity Institutional Wealth Services. The Boston-based financial giant wants to make sure they aren't creating "barriers to chooding where to custody a client's assets," Durbin says. "A lot of this was based on feedback from our clients."