Fidelity will stress news and advice online

Traffic on Yahoo was a wakeup call, its consultant says

Fidelity Investments is getting back into the news business.

Eight years after selling its chain of community newspapers, the Boston mutual fund giant plans a broad revamp of its fidelity.com website to give top billing to business news articles and personal finance columnists from around the Web, plus budgeting tips and other research from outsiders.

Investors will still keep the same access to their accounts, but overall the changes previewed by Fidelity executives yesterday show the company's home page will resemble financial portals such as News Corp.'s Marketwatch.com and Yahoo.com's finance section.

"People want to be grounded in what's happening," said Sean Belka, Fidelity online strategy chief. "People value Fidelity's opinion and point of view, but at the same time they wanted other viewpoints." He said the changes were based on research that revealed customers wanted more insight into markets and individual stocks.

Most of the changes were planned before the market turmoil that struck this fall, he said, events that increased the site's traffic 50 percent, compared with the summer. Fidelity had already begun posting a separate news page inside its site that is edited by journalists hired from outside. Contributors included James B. Stewart of SmartMoney magazine and CNN.com's Gerri Willis, as well as Fidelity's own staff.

Those articles will move to a top-billed "Breaking News" section of Fidelity.com starting at the end of this month for randomly selected customers, with all users of Fidelity.com receiving the revamped site by March, he said. Other features will include financial tools, such as one that shows how much people pay for mortgages and other expenses, broken down by ZIP code.

Boston business consultant Patricia Seybold, who assisted Fidelity with the design, said it is based on studies showing customers are more interested in what's happening to their assets than in abstract financial planning tools. Many were previously using www.finance.yahoo.com rather than Fidelity's own site, which she said was a "wakeup call" for the investment firm.

Fidelity has already built ties to outside firms, such as showing what ratings are given its funds by Chicago research firm Morningstar.com Other organizations post outside stories about their own operations, such as the National Football League, which runs Associated Press articles about teams and players.

It remains to be seen just how Fidelity might handle news articles with details about itself. News about Fidelity "is not the focus" of the site, Belka said.

Fidelity and other fund firms have spent millions building websites as one of their best ways to reach customers, especially since about nine in 10 make investment choices through an intermediary, such as a 401(k) plan administrator or a financial adviser, according to industry consultant BJ Greenwald & Associates of Philadelphia.

So far, few other financial companies have edged into the news business, after learning a decade ago that most visitors were looking for particular information instead of general news, said Lee Kowarski, principal of Kasina, a consulting firm in New York for asset managers.

Similarly, only a few fund firms, including Fidelity, Vanguard Group Inc., and Schwab, have enough users actively monitoring and trading their accounts to be worth courting with a lot of additional outside content, he said.

"It would be a mistake for many other fund firms to look at a Fidelity site and decide it makes sense for them," he said.

Ross Kerber can be reached at kerber@globe.com.