Fidelity’s little-known passive investment business Geode Capital Management surged to $1tn in assets last year, underscoring its quiet emergence as a major player in the index fund industry.
Geode’s breakneck growth — it has more than doubled in size over the past two years — has helped Fidelity leapfrog its Boston neighbour State Street Global Advisors to become the world’s third-biggest money manager, with assets of $4.5tn at the end of last year, according to a person familiar with the matter. SSGA ended 2021 at $4.1tn.
“It’s a meaningful moment for the broader world of asset management and in terms of a pair of Boston-based rivals,” said Ben Johnson, an analyst at Morningstar. “For a long period of time, indexing was antithetical for everything that Fidelity stood for.”