Financial Adviser at Fidelity = Churn and Burn - Anonymous employee Fidelity Investments Employee Review

There are many. 1) Financial Advisers have 300-1000 households to support and no real help to do so. The support staff is too inexperienced to do much more than help with some admin stuff and if they are good enough to actually help clients they move into a Financial Adviser role. 2) Your experience as an adviser can be made much worse by terrible managers who micro manage and have little knowledge of what you actually do. 3) Assuming 1 and 2 above, Financial Consultant role is too much of a grind to be a career. You either spend 2-5 years there and then move into management or you burn out and leave. Advisers have 300-1000+ households and there is no meaningful compensation for retention of assets given the book sizes. ($40k year for a $200 mil managed money book? - book generates $1.5 - $2 mil annual revenue and you give the adviser $40k?) Vast majority of your comp is tied to annual sales and what you have done in the past means nothing. Therefore clients that have a plan and 100% wallet share are undesirable. Since company is so large and has so many clients they need to fill the chairs with advisers quickly. Many advisers are 20 and 30 somethings with little or no background in finance, they do the bare minimum for planning and only want to sell products and managed accounts. There is little incentive to really deliver a sound plan because that actually takes time and who has time with 1000 clients? Overall - the reality is Fidelity is good for “mass affluent” financial help but they are too big and cookie cutter to truly help people with more than $3-$5 mil. Due to size they have to reduce services to lowest common denominator to ensure consistency.