FIDELITY HEEDS CRITICS, UNTANGLES WEB SITE: PERSONAL INVESTING ON THE INTERNET MADE MORE USER FRIENDLY

Fidelity Investments, responding to complaints that its personal-investing World Wide Web site is too difficult to navigate, recently unveiled some improvements.

The Boston-based mutual fund giant, which maintains somewhere in the vicinity of 23,000 pages of information at www.fidelity.com, reworked the site to include “tabs” — much like folders in a filing cabinet — intended to make it easier for visitors to move around the site. The tabs divide the site into six sections: accounts and trades, news and quotes, research, retirement, planning, and products and education.

In addition, investors now have to log in only once to access their portfolio. Before the upgrade, they had to sign in every time they moved from one part of the site to another.

Investors aren’t the only ones benefiting from changes to the site. Registered investment advisers with access to Fidelity’s Private Page Web site can now access their clients’ account statements via the Internet. The firm wouldn’t release the number of advisers that utilize its Web site, but estimates it works with some 2,500 advisers nationwide.

just 17TH IN SURVEY

“Convenience is what online investing is all about and this new design delivers,” says Stephen Cone, president of customer marketing and development at Fidelity Personal Investments and Brokerage Group.

And not a moment too soon. Fidelity’s site finished 17th in the most recent quarterly ranking of 52 online brokerage sites surveyed by Gomez Associates, a research firm in Boston.

The top five sites, in order of ranking, were: DLJ Direct, Waterhouse Securities, Lindner Funds, National Discount Brokers and Web Street Securities.

Fidelity’s site scored high in such categories as “on-site resources” and “customer confidence.” But it had the lowest “ease of use” rating among the major firms.

“Fidelity’s army of employees acts as a rapid deployment force for customer service phone duty on busy days,” the Gomez report says. &
quot;But there’s a lot of heavy lifting to do before this broken site stops generating a big slug of those calls. It’s a maze full of dead ends and walls of disclosure statements.”

‘cautiously optimistic’

John Robb, a partner at Gomez, describes the recent changes to the Fidelity site as an “improvement.”

“I’m cautiously optimistic,” he says. “I think it’s going to help Fidelity do more of what they have planned for the site.”

Despite the complaints, Fidelity has been successful in drawing investors to its site. In 1997, the company saw the number of visits to its site climb to 8 million from 500,000. Over the same period, it increased its number of online accounts from 30,000 to 800,000 — about 13% of Fidelity’s 6.3 million retail customers.

Online orders now account for about half of commission trades at Fidelity’s discount brokerage, as opposed to 8% at the beginning of 1997, Fidelity says.

Fidelity was one of the first investment firms to dabble in online customer service. In 1984, it launched an online trading service called Fidelity Investors Express. Charles Schwab Corp., the nation’s largest discount broker, introduced online trading software in 1985.

Experts predict Internet investment services will continue to grow. Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., estimates that assets held by online investors, both in brokerage and mutual fund accounts, will grow to $688 billion in 2002 from $120 billion in 1997.

Even more dramatic, it forecasts growth in online mutual fund accounts to $241 billion in 2002 from $12 billion in 1997.