The present Fidelity logo was designed in 2011, which was a milestone moment in the company’s long history. This was when its international division was renamed Fidelity Worldwide Investment.
Fidelity Investment is a United States international financial corporation that Edward C. Johnson II founded in 1946. During its entire history, the corporation has been restructured many times and also rebranded.
Today, Fidelity Investments is one of the world’s biggest financial corporations, with more than $3 million in mutual funds, assets, and a brokerage company. The company is also involved in services like pension savings, insurance, securities clearance, and cryptocurrency. The company’s headquarters are in Boston, Massachusetts.
What does the Fidelity Logo Mean?
There’s no doubt that the Fidelity logotype looks very much like the two popular Freemason symbols—the Pyramid and Eye of Providence. This can be a sign of the corporation’s connection with Freemasons.
But it’s also worth noting that virtually the same image is featured on the back of the dollar bills and the Great Seal. Therefore, in this case, the Fidelity logo can be seen as depicting the company’s commitment to earning money.
History of the Fidelity Logo
In 1979, 23 years after Fidelity Management & Research was formed, it had an international division specializing in serving overseas markets far outside America. In 1980, the financial corporation separated the International Division into an independent organization.
In 1993, Fidelity Investments approved a new Fidelity logo, which is still in use today. In 2011, Fidelity went through a rebranding. This is because the Fidelity International department was renamed Fidelity Worldwide Investment, and its legal status changed. One year after Fidelity expanded its financial services, it moved to its present Boston headquarters.
Fidelity Logo Design Elements
Symbol: The brand identity of the Fidelity Logo is a balanced combination of text and graphic elements. First, there’s a circular icon and pyramid with an isolated top. There’s a shining sun behind with 12 long rays, which are sharp and stretch virtually to the outside edge. Furthermore, only two colors make up both images with the right group of shadows.
The name “Fidelity Investments” is on the right and takes two lines. At the top are large lowercase letters of the word “Fidelity” with a bit of a slant. Below the word “Fidelity” are smaller uppercase letters of the word “investments,” slanted to the right. The distinctive feature of the logotype is the connected letters “y” and “t.”
What is the Fidelity Font:
The Fidelity emblem and Fidelity font feature a bold, solid font. It has a certain dynamism thanks to the italicized characters. A unique feature of the logotype is perhaps the way “t” and “y” are combined together.
Fidelity Logo Color: On the Fidelity company site, the Fidelity logo appears as a mix of white and a comforting, natural green shade. Green seems like an apt choice since it’s thought to be the color of cash and is often chosen by companies that deal with finance.
The History of Fidelity Investments
Fidelity Investments Inc. is one of the biggest retail investment service companies in the U.S. Fidelity offers one of the largest varieties of mutual funds the world over, along with discount brokerage and trust and institutional services.
Innovation has played a particularly pivotal role in the progress of the company. The investment world has raised many eyebrows at how Fidelity bosses have led the company through uncharted waters. For example, Fidelity was the first company to avail mutual funds along with check-writing services; the first to provide updates on a mutual fund’s value by the hour; and the first to provide same-day buying and selling of fund stocks.
Fidelity is owned privately and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. While standing out from the crowd, the financial corporation, with more than 3 million corporate and individual customers, is among the biggest mutual funds managers in the United States, trailing only Merrill Lynch.
In 1930, Fidelity Fund was founded. It was a tough time for the investment industry, as it was reeling from the stock market crash in 1929 and sliding into the Great Depression. A Boston lawyer, Edward C. Johnson II, bought the fund and became its director and president.
In 1946, Johnson founded Fidelity Management & Research Company, which preceded Fidelity Investments, to act as an investment guide for the Fidelity Fund. Johnson also formed the Puritan Fund, the first income-centered fund buy common stock.
At that time, investment management was focused on preserving capital, but Johnson’s goal was to make a profit. And make a profit he did. His approach was to buy stocks with the potential to grow as opposed to buying blue-chip stocks.
Johnson believed that one person’s knowledge and instincts were the keys to managing a mutual fund rather than management by committee. Therefore, he became the first person to put someone in charge of a mutual fund.
Gerry Tsai was one of his earliest, best fund managers. Johnson had hired the young, callow immigrant from Shanghai as a stock expert in the early ’50s. In 1957, Tsai started managing Fidelity Capital Fund, investing in speculative stocks like Xerox and Polaroid. His performance brought him customers and fame, and in under ten years, he was in charge of over $1 billion. In 1965, Tsai left Fidelity when Johnson reportedly informed him that he wanted to leave the company in the to his son, Edward C. Johnson III.
A Harvard graduate, Edward C. Johnson III served in the military for a couple of years and worked as a banker before joining Fidelity in 1957. From 1961, when he managed the newly founded Trend Fund, to 1965, the number one growth fund was the Trend Fund.
The American economy and Fidelity flourished throughout the 1960s. In 1962, the Magellan Fund was established by Fidelity, eventually becoming the world’s largest mutual fund. In 1964, the company also established FMR Investment Management Service for company pension plans, followed by a retirement fund for self-employed people called Keogh Plan in 1967.
In 1968, Fidelity International was launched in Bermuda to entice foreign investments. In 1969, the company launched Fidelity Service Company to serve customer accounts in-house, becoming one of the first fund organizations to do so.
In 1972, Edward Johnson III replaced his father as Fidelity Investments president; around the time, the market started to decline. Investors started to ditch equity funds and stocks in favor of the security offered by savings accounts. Still, in the same year, the company established FMR Corporation to provide other Fidelity companies with corporate administration services.
During the first two years of Johnson III’s presidency, the financial market remained almost dormant, and assets fell by over 30 percent to $3 billion. Johnson III needed a way out of the mire. The money market fund came to his aid. These new funds generated very short-term loans using investors’ deposits.
Since the principal isn’t under any real risk and just the interest changes, money market funds proved to be a smart investment, but Johnson III knew that the new funds would never be really competitive unless they offered the same service and liquidity as saving accounts. Therefore, he formed Fidelity Daily Income Trust in 1974, the first-ever money market fund that offered check-writing, a ground-breaking and immediately successful idea.
While Fidelity founder had dedicated himself to mutual funds, his son explored new areas of the business. Consequently, in 1973, Johnson III started to vertically integrate the company by taking charge of back-office account-processing services from banks that did the job on behalf of most mutual funds.
Also, he adopted direct sales instead of sales via brokers, enabling the company to reduce costs. But this also saw Fidelity spending a fortune on telephones, computers, and advertising when it was cash-strapped due to a depressed market.
In the mid-1970s, Fidelity created the company’s Individual Retirement Account and Municipal Bond Fund, which was the first open-ended, no-load fund in America to buy tax-free municipal bonds. Fidelity founder Edward Johnson II retired in 1977, and his son became the company’s CEO and chairman. That same year, Peter Lynch started overseeing the Magellan Fund, with assets worth $22 million at the time.
After the United States abolished fixed-rate brokerage commissions in 1975, Fidelity was the first major financial company in the country to offer budget brokerage services by forming Fidelity Brokerage Services. The following year, the company formed Fidelity Institutional Services to handle relationships with company clients.
Throughout the 1980s, Fidelity savored the bull market like the rest of America. It was a decade of significant growth for the company as assets under management increased from $3 billion to $13 billion between 1974 and 1981.
From 1980 to 1983, Fidelity introduced a number of new products: the tax-free Money Market Trust (which was America’s first tax-exempt, no-load money market fund); Ultra Service Account (which was the sole asset-management account provided by a mutual fund group); Fidelity Money Line (which offers electronic fund-transfer services countrywide); as well as sector funds (which contained standalone portfolios specializing in certain industries).
Fidelity also spun off many subsidiary firms, including Fidelity Systems, Fidelity Management Trust, Fidelity Marketing, Fidelity National Financial (a publicly-owned title insurance firm in the U.S), as well as Fidelity Investments Southwest (Dallas-based remote-operations center). After launching telephone switching, which enabled customers to trade funds over the phone, Fidelity launched another remote operations office in Salt Lake City in 1986.
Fidelity also introduced one-day trading of its Select Portfolio funds, allowing investors to receive quotes by the hour and to purchase or redeem shares from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., instead of waiting until after the latter time to receive the final net asset value of a fund.
By 1986, Fidelity boasted 2,800 employees, $50 billion worth of assets under management, 104 mutual funds, as well as over 2 million customers—of which 400 000 were in the Magellan Fund worth $4 billion. From 1977—when Peter Lynch first took over Magellan—to 1987, the fund’s stock had increased by over 2,000%, outdoing the rest of the mutual funds and in the process making Lynch the best fund manager in the industry.
Since Lynch kept minimal liquid capital and didn’t invest much in conservative stocks, the Wall Street crash of 1987 hit the Magellan Fund hard. Caught off guard, Fidelity had to sell lots of shares in a falling market to service redemptions. On the first day of the crash alone, Fidelity sold almost $1 billion worth of shares. Within one week, Fidelity’s asset base had been reduced by $8 billion. In 1988, a year after the crash, the firm’s revenues were down 25%, and profits were down 70%.
Although Johnson III wouldn’t want Fidelity to go public, many analysts believe that it’s only a matter of time before they go public. For now, Johnson focuses on the long-term success of Fidelity and strengthening its discount brokerage business—already among the top three operations in the country—in a bid to attract small-time investors back into the fold.
After the 1987 Wall Street crash, Fidelity shut down four offices but also opened three more and planned to open five to ten years and to buy out smaller discount brokers. To avoid ever going through another crash, Johnson III has also slashed staff by nearly a third. And the company is also building its international appeal and starting to penetrate the highly lucrative insurance industry.
By 1989, with over $80 billion worth of assets under management, Fidelity had over 9% of the whole mutual fund industry. That’s quite impressive for a family business that began just 43 years earlier with a single mutual fund worth $3 million.
The Takeaway
Fidelity Investments Inc. is a private investment management firm that was founded as a mutual fund in 1946. The company now offers a large variety of services, including investment advice, fund distribution, life insurance, wealth management, securities clearance, execution, and retirement services. It manages balanced mutual funds, fixed income, and equity for individual investors, financial advisors, institutional investors, and businesses.
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Fidelity is one of America’s biggest investment management companies, with more than 26 million customers, over $2.4 trillion in worldwide assets under management, and $6.5 trillion worth of customer assets.
