Fidelity Investments is a group of privately held companies in the financial services industry. It is made up by two independent but closely cooperating companies, Fidelity Management and Research LLC (FMR LLC), founded in 1946 and serving the North American market, and Fidelity International Limited (FIL), spun off in 1969 to provide investment products and services to clients outside the Americas.
Fidelity Investments includes a large family of mutual funds, their distributors and investment advisors, as well as providing discount brokerage services, retirement services, estate planning, wealth management, securities execution and clearance, life insurance and a number of other services.

Benefits outsourcing
Fidelity Investments also owns many unrelated businesses, including a charter motor coach service, a luxury hotel, and a temporary employment agency. It formerly owned Community Newspaper Company, the largest chain of newspapers in suburban Boston, sold to the Boston Herald and now owned by GateHouse Media. Fidelity has also strategically invested in the telecom/managed services/data center industries, having incubated COLT Telecom in Europe, MetroRED in South America, and KVH in Japan.
One sector in which the company has heavily invested is in commercial lumber and building materials. This new business has been developed under the Pro-Build Holdings company brand, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fidelity Capital.
Pro-Build Holdings currently operates more than 500 lumber and building product distribution, manufacturing and assembly centers throughout the U.S., operating under several regional brands, including Hope Lumber, United Building Centers, Spenard Builders Supply, Lumbermens, Home Lumber Company, Dixieline Lumber Company, Parker Lumber Company, F. E. Wheaton & Company, Strober Building Supply, U.S. Components, Lanoga Corporation and the Contractor Yard. Pro-Build has more than 16,000 employees with 2006 revenues in excess of $6 billion.
In 2007, Fidelity Investments moved to rebrand many of these private equity investments and portfolio holdings under the "Devonshire Investments" entity/brand to avoid potential confusion with its more consumer-oriented financial services and mutual funds business.

Other businesses
US brokerages regulator NASD fined four FMR-affiliated broker-dealers $3.75 million for alleged registration, supervision and e-mail retention violations in February 2007. The broker-dealers settled without admitting or denying the charges.
Fidelity Brokerage was ordered to pay $2 million to settle charges that employees altered and destroyed documents in 21 of its 88 branch offices from January 2001 to July 2002. Fidelity has internal inspections every year to make sure it is complying with federal regulations. The Securities and Exchange Commission accused that Fidelity management pressured branch employees to have perfect inspections and gave advance notice of the inspections and that at least 62 employees destroyed or altered potentially improper documents maintained at branch offices including new account applications, letters of authorization and variable annuity forms.
In May 2007, NASD fined two Fidelity broker-dealers $400,000 for preparing and distributing misleading sales literature promoting Fidelity's Destiny I and II Systematic Investment Plans, which were sold primarily to U.S. military personnel. As part of the settlement, for the next five years, the two broker-dealers - Fidelity Investments Institutional Services Company, Inc. of Smithfield, RI and Fidelity Distributors Corporation of Boston - are required to notify Destiny Plan holders who want to increase their investments in existing Destiny Plans that additional shares of the underlying fund can be purchased outside the Destiny Plans without paying the additional creation and sales charges of up to 50 percent on the first year's payments.

NASD troubles
The founding Johnson family controls most of Fidelity. Edward "Ned" C. Johnson 3rd is chairman of the group. His daughter, Abigail Johnson, was once the largest single shareholder with about 25%, but in October 2005, it was reported that she had sold a "significant" portion of her shares to family trusts, and that there are doubts as to whether she is still in line to succeed her father. [2]
The FMR mutual funds are organized as Massachusetts business trusts tied to the lifetime of the Johnsons. Some of Fidelity's best known fund managers also own a share in the company, most notably Peter Lynch.
Revenue in 2003 were US$9.2 billion, followed by US$10.5 billion in 2004. As of 2007, Fidelity had 47,000 employees.
FMR's corporate headquarters are located in Boston, Massachusetts, with the largest U.S. operations located in Marlborough, Massachusetts; Merrimack, New Hampshire; Smithfield, Rhode Island; Westlake, Texas; Covington, Kentucky; Durham, North Carolina; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Salt Lake City, Utah. It also has offices in Canada in Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. (In 2007, Fidelity Canada was named one of Canada's Top 100 Employers, as published in Maclean's magazine, the only mutual fund management company to receive this honour.) As of 2006 Fidelity is in the process of opening a large site in Jacksonville, Florida, to serve as a customer service center similar in size to its New Hampshire site.
FIL's offices include asset management companies in 10 locations: London, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bombay, Seoul, Singapore and Sydney, and an extensive network of offices in 23 countries, employing more than 4,000 people.

Innovative marketing

List of mutual-fund families