YouSaid · the spoken record

Abby Johnson

lines on the record: 39
first: 2019-01-08
most recent: 2019-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, today is actually my 30th wedding anniversary. So, thank you Have a very kind husband who's put up with a lot over the years, especially since it's today, I would say, the kindness of my husband over the years”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the positive is that any company, assuming it has more or less good direction, will tend to benefit from consistent leadership. So when you're working with 50% the same genetic material, then that probably contributes something to the consistency. So that's the positive. The negatives is it gets complicated and you have to be prepared to deal with those complications. And certainly the pressure to think about leaving the wood pile bigger than it was when it was handed to you is significant. So just be prepared for that”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business better. So those are two of the biggest areas where there's just a lot of opportunity within our core asset management business. We've stepped up our willingness to be more aggressive about trying new asset classes, developing new fee structures that we”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give our operations some diversification and they help us develop stickier customer relationships in terms of working with the companies. And it's just a more fulsome business model. So continuing to build that out, ditto with intermediaries. long distributed our funds we've had a specific line of funds that we distribute through investment intermediaries and we have a much broader suite of services now to offer to those intermediaries so we offer clearing and custody services we acquired a company called e-money which is a software services business that provides tools to intermediaries to enable them to be able to run their”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All kinds of stuff. I mean, the biggest thing is really trying to diversify our business of serving individuals and trying to have more opportunities in terms of how we serve people, for example, in the workplace. So we began by being a 401k provider. So today in our workplace services business, yes, we're the biggest 401k provider, but we also provide a whole suite of other services as well. And yes, those businesses aren't as big and as robust as being a 401k record keeper and a provider of investments that sit on that platform, but they're good fee-based services that”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that carries through and is a valuable concept in the rest of the organization. I mean, everything is better if people are willing to debate it. So fostering an environment where there's diversity of thought and opinion, which comes naturally from people with different backgrounds, is going to be critical to our success as a future business.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Different than men's because we've studied it. So we know we need more women who are customer-facing people to be able to meet that need. So that's a baseline business need that is very important to us. You know, growing up in the investment business, one of the things that makes for a vibrant investment organization is diversity of thought and opinion. Even within Fidelity, one of the things that I always loved about the organization was that you were encouraged to have your own point of view on a stock. There was no expectation that people would agree on stocks, whether they were buy, sells, or holds. And the point was to be able to have a clear opinion and be able to defend your opinion.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, one thing that has changed over the course of my career significantly is the profile of our customers. And as a starting point, we need more women in our organization to be able to serve the women who are our customers. And that's not to say that only women can serve women because that's not what I'm saying at all, but we do know that oftentimes women will come into one of our branches and specifically asked to work for a woman. And they may do that before they've met any fidelity rep. And I'd certainly like to think that any fidelity rep could serve any person who walked in the door. And that's certainly our expectation. But nevertheless, you can understand that we know women's attitudes towards investing are”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I first moved from being an investor to being a manager and a leader of an organization, one of the things that I noticed that leaders of the companies that I had invested in and followed did pretty consistently was really think about how they communicated with their broad constituents. The best ones always under promised and over-delivered. So I've always tried to keep that little buzz going in the back of my brain as I go through my responsibilities and be mindful of your limits because everybody and every institution does have limits. So make sure you keep those in mind. But of course, now that I'm leading, I know I'm very cognizant also of having to push the organization and push for change that needs to happen to ensure our future.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess my early days of going into try to talk to Peter about how I thought possibly he might be able to make money in some small little machinery stock was probably about as intimidated as I've ever been in my life. He's an amazing guy and he has a unique ability to be able to tell stories that have created important lessons for other people and that in a lot of ways sets him apart.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm lucky enough now to be sitting on a floor at Fidelity where I get to do that every day that I'm in the office because there's a lot of those people. Certainly, if you name one name, it has to be Peter Lynch because, I mean, he was the greatest investor Fidelity had. He made so much money for so many people. Develop the bench of investors who is so successful for so many of our investors today. I think if Will Danoff, Joel Tillinghast, or Steve Weimer were sitting here”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would argue they haven't really changed that much. The people I've known over my career who are the greatest investors are people who know how to look at the numbers are superior at being dispassionate about the facts And also, have a sense of how to understand people and when. They're assessing the future of a company. They're taking into account the people characteristics. Is this person credible? Can they really execute on the plan that they're talking to me about? And does the plan make sense versus what I know is going on in that marketplace?”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our investment groups have, and I think this is pretty common in the industry today, have efforts around gathering data from publicly available sources to be able to analyze trends. And much in the same way, we do in our customer-facing functions really support and be an added input to the human decision making that goes on. So that's interesting space. I think that's a very natural evolution of the investing process. Ever since investing began, it was always a combination of quantitative and qualitative skills that the most successful investors demonstrated.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do and even today, now with the less exalted prices, it's still a $300 billion market. I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at. It's significant. It's just that it's nascent and it grew so quickly that most of the companies who are playing in this space today are equally new companies. They're all companies that came into being post 2009.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did end up making money, but we never expected to. That was really just because the price went even today way above what we expected it to. And now we're looking at interesting things that we'll see what happens.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, make charitable contributions with their assets. So that was actually very helpful because it also introduced us to some of the key players in the industry. One thing we did early on that I pushed hard for that not so many other people were really excited about was to set up a mining operation. Now it's a very small mining operation, but I thought it was important for us to do that because I wanted us to really learn the business at the foundational basis at the foundation level. And I thought that it would help us attract talent that we were going to need for the future and that it would also get us a seat at the table in the industry. So it did help us do all of those things. And miraculously,”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pitching out to the organization to try to look at. We got more people interested because of that. Early on it didn't ever occur to us the concept of a digital store of value. And that was something that I've come to appreciate later on, the idea of a digital asset and a unique digital asset is really interesting because if those assets develop and I think they will, they're going to be assets that people are going to want to invest in. And that's something that we're going to have to be prepared for. So our use cases, I'm not sure many of them, in fact most of them didn't quite get the legs that we would have liked at this time, but nevertheless the one we did get launched was the To make donations to our charitable gift fund. And we actually did quite well. We were able to help a number of early Bitcoin investors be able to”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, those were the two things that really captured my attention. It seems controversial and it was a pretty challenging thing to understand, but I really tried to, I'm not a technologist, but I tried to an analyst, so I tried to understand it. And I had a few other colleagues here at Fidelity who I discovered were asking some of the same questions that I was asking. We began getting together on a weekly basis just to talk about it. And out of that came a series of use cases where we thought potentially Bitcoin or a future cryptocurrency or the blockchain might be applicable. And we had, I don't know, maybe a couple dozen uses.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I got interested in 2010 timeframe, I guess. And it was just one of those things you heard about. And I always try to figure out just generally what something is. And so I thought, well, you know what the heck is this? And I don't know. So like lots of things are like that. And so I just read a little bit about it. And I got interested in it more because there were two things that I thought were really intriguing about it that were really important to us as an organization. The first was the security. And of course, cybersecurity is a very major topic for us on a regular basis. Secondly, Hayments and the idea that there might be a payments network that would be different than today's payments network.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, any kind of routine service things that if you're on the fly, that should be super easy to do on your phone and just be able to just get it done and move on with your life and not be weighed down by anything.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of an existential question. I'm not sure I can answer there at the end. It's not so much about any of us wanting it to go away or not go away because we're responding to what we see out there. And what we see out there is a consistent expectation on the part of customers that they have some kind of regular cadence with us in terms of discussing their investment portfolio. Is it still the portfolio that makes sense for them? How is their life changing? How is the market changing? And is this really the right makeup for them? And that makes a lot of sense. What we want is to make sure that any issues around people putting money into their fidelity account, taking money out of their fidelity account, changing their address.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can help us discern and track a lot of those attitudes and help provide more personalized service and all that complexity that has built up over the years also is difficult for our people who are interacting with people to manage just all in their head. I mean, they need technology tools to be able to help them support the conversations that they're having with individuals because they know a lot, but it's impossible for anybody to know everything. You need to have decision support tools to be able to make it as best as possibly can.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the highest level, I believe it's about a person feeling more confident about us as an institution after every interaction they have with us. And that interaction could be digital. It could be over the phone, it could be in person. It doesn't really matter. So what I talk to people at Fidelity about is having customers feel increasingly more confident in us as their provider. And beyond that, it gets pretty complicated because people's attitudes towards money are extremely personal. There's a lot of space where there aren't right and wrong answers. And it's really important to recognize that. Technology”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone who's alive today, people want to be able to talk to somebody about their money. And just because digital capabilities are, I would argue, critical to be competitive in today's world, they're not sufficient to really meet the holistic needs of almost everybody.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do through a digital interaction that are really helpful to building a different kind of a customer relationship, giving them information that is personalized and targeted to them and giving them time to be able to digest that information, perhaps talk about it with a spouse. What their personal preferences are outside of the official relationship. And that's kind of how we got started. But then really being able to learn about a person and be able to offer things that are appropriate, suitable, and what that person wants is really where the industry is going. Now, there's one sort of caveat to all of this, which is that we're pretty confident that at least for”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the basic starting point is that you have to look at your customer base and recognize, as I think everybody did some number of not too many years ago and realize that the new way of interacting was being paved by the e-commerce companies and that people had become way more comfortable with that way of interacting, I think, much more quickly than probably would have been anticipated. So quickly, quickly, quickly, catch up with that. Have lots of basic service capability that's super quick, navigable, and very generally mobile friendly. So we've gotten to that point. And then you start to realize that there's actually a lot of things.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then spaces where you're allowed to make mistakes. So putting little contained spaces together where people can be challenged to build an MVP and actually test that MVP on a pilot basis with real customers is culturally a hard thing for us to do because nobody wants to put something out there that maybe we're not going to get less than perfect feedback on. But you can't move quickly if you aren't willing to do that. And there's ways to manage that risk. You try to make sure that you're testing your MVP with an appropriate group of people. But you only learn these things by”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some long term decisions are revocable, but they aren't all necessarily. And in fact, when it comes to seeding new business ideas, it's, I think, best to try to think of them in the irrevocable category because one of the cultural challenges that we have is with some of these new businesses, we have to get people comfortable making mistakes. Traditionally in financial services There are a lot more things where you have to have zero tolerance around making mistakes.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a trajectory of lower unit costs. The next thing is thinking about how you allocate the excess capital. How am I investing for the future? And then we have a planning cycle that we work through we're in some stage of virtually all year round. So try to mix that short and medium term thinking with the very much longer term thinking.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether they're individuals, institutions, or intermediaries. And then aligned with that, are we really delivering on the service expectations that we've set out and hopefully exceeding the service expectations? I mentioned the fee pressure in our industry. So the next thing is, are we doing those repeatable processes, those repetitive service functions on a lower and lower cost basis as time goes on? Because if you're not, you have to, I mean, there's certain things in your business that the cost goes up every year. So you've got to manage a lot of things down to at least stay even. And if you want to be lowering your costs and have some excess capital to invest, then you've got to have visibility.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a few different categories. And they're broadly laid out in the same way that a P&L is laid out. So I think about are we doing enough to meet the needs of the marketplace that we have established already? So our core commitment as a business has to be on Are we delivering for our current base of customers on the expectations that we have set for them? That's got to be the first job of, I think, any financial services business because that's the foundation of your relationship. Are we retaining and building our relationship with those customers? So looking at the various indicators that tell me how we're performing with different categories of customers.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is a big question that I could probably talk for way too long. That's good. That's the whole point of this work. So I would start by saying I first put decisions into one of two buckets. In my role that I'm in today, decisions are either revocable decisions and irrevocable decisions. And I put those in really different categories. So most of the decisions that I make are on a day-to-day basis are revocable decisions. And I think that's probably mostly what you're asking about decisions about how we run the business on a day-to-day basis, how we make investments for the future. So I guess because of my background as an analyst, I think about the decisions”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Savings and wealth building and there's just so many choices and things to learn about that it's really very difficult. So we need to help with innovations that make that more navigable that often means more digital solutions and that's really where we have to accelerate.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the success of the mutual fund. And we were good at that. We developed a strong, stable of investment talent that excelled in that vehicle. And that gave us tremendous run through the 1990s and the early part of the new millennium. And then things changed. The financial crisis really changed our business. So what do we need to do? We need to innovate with more offerings. And those offerings for our core marketplace, which is really the mass affluent of U.S. investors, is helping people navigate what has become an incredibly complicated landscape for people who are not in the industry themselves and are trying to take responsibility for their own personal”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trend that I think has just really changed the business since I joined. More recently, there's been an acceleration around fees, when I say more recently, I'm really thinking the last 10 years of fee pressure. Also, the last 10 years and acceleration in the regulatory change and the potential regulation impact from the industry are really, those are the two big things that I talk to people about internally most frequently when I'm trying to recalibrate everybody in the company's expectations about what's going to be different in the future than it has been in the past. So in response to that, we need to get better at innovating because we were a company that really built our framework”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a traditional stockbroker and try to buy individual securities and work with that broker to develop an equity portfolio that suited them, or they could buy a mutual fund. So it was pretty straightforward world back then. And now if you look at the range of options that any retail investor has in front of them, it's such a wide range of options that are out there. ETFs didn't exist, managed accounts didn't exist. It was just a lot of the derivative products that are now packaged and sold, not so much to retail investors, maybe more to sophisticated investors, but potentially to individuals. The complexity of our industry is probably the overriding”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Adjusted their business strategies and were really rewarded for doing so. That is kind of a perfect segue to the asset management world of today, which I think in certain aspects is mature, but I know a great deal of your attention is thinking about kind of where we've been and where we're going and trying to position a big company accordingly. So I'd love to just get your, at least starting take on the most significant trends, could be in recent years, could be over a longer period of time, that you see in the asset management space as being the things that you most need to focus on as a business to evolve with the changing landscape. Because I think it's fair to say we are fairly mature and costs have come down, fees have come down. So there are some headwinds. So some general framing thoughts on the big trends in asset management would be a great place to start. And then we'll go kind of into each vertical, if you will. Well, when I started in the industry, individuals had two choices. They could either go”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To invest because you had to really look a lot at valuations and whether the company had a long-term future because so much consolidation was going on because it wasn't a growing industry that you had to think about that as well. I imagine that capital allocation skill of the managers was a key part of analyzing those businesses. Was that something you cared a lot about? Well, you had to certainly watch where they were investing and were these companies investing for an industry that used to exist, which some of the management teams were when you knew that the world of manufacturing was going to change dramatically. And some of the companies really were quite forward-looking and thought about how industrial production was really going to change.”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when I first joined Fidelity after I got out of business school, I joined in 1988 as an equity analyst and I was assigned industrial equipment as the industry to follow. And as you can imagine, the brand new analyst didn't get all the plum assignments. So my assignment was no exception. And I spent a lot of time traveling to the Midwest where most of the companies were located. And so my early experience in investing was really learning how to analyze and try to figure out how to make money in mature to declining industries. So as you can imagine, that industry today is quite a bit smaller than it was back in the late 80s. It was actually a really great way to learn how to”
2019-01-08 · Invest Like the Best · Abby Johnson – Future of Finance - [Invest Like the Best, EP.116] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source