Investment manager Fidelity will establish an online fund supermarket in Germany.
While it was among the first to launch online fund supermarkets both in the US and the UK, US fund manager Fidelity has taken considerably longer to launch the same offering in Germany. In the meantime, a number of players, in particular the aggressively expanding German online stockbrokers, have highly developed their fund supermarkets. Fidelity will find it hard to compete with the firmly established operations of Brokerage 24, comdirect, ConSors and Direkt Anlage Bank.
Offering third party funds has become a must in order to satisfy the growing number of customers who demand the best product on the market. It will only play a minor role, though, in increasing Fidelity’s share in the German fund business. The key to Fidelity’s market share certainly lies in distribution, but distribution via the Internet has not yet become significant. The big German fund managers, like ADIG, DIT and DWS, can distribute heavily through the bank branch networks of their parent companies. Fidelity will have to expand both its online and offline distribution network if it wants to outgrow the competition and match its US and UK success.
