Historically, Fidelity Investments (Fidelity news) has been seen as a mutual fund company. Some of you also know the company as a massive retail stock brokerage and a benefits outsourcing service provider. But would it surprise you to hear that Vice Chairman Abigail Johnson, daughter of Ned Johnson, describes the company this way: "We at Fidelity view ourselves just as much as a financial information processing company as an investment management firm."

That's right, an information processing company. There's good reason for this. According to Securities Industry News, "Fidelity's operations and information technology, she said, now must maintain records for 22 million workplace participants, the details of 19,000 different defined-contribution plans, 12 million retail brokerage accounts and 212,000 commissionable transactions every day. Its two web sites, fidelity.com and netbenefits.com, also are visited by 3 million users daily. Handling this requires 10,000 servers and 60,000 personal computers, at Fidelity fingertips. Last year, 35 million lines of code were tested for software vulnerability."

So when you get down to it, just like the big exchanges are morphing into data center companies, all financial services firms are at their core technology companies (financial services news). That's where the value is. Agree? 

For more:
- here's the Securities Industry News article

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