HOW FIDELITY BRINGS DIGITAL ASSETS TO INSTITUTIONAL CLIENTS

WRITTEN BY: ALEX CLERE

PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

Informed by customer demand, Fidelity International has backed itself to create innovative investment products for institutional clients

When we first talk to Fidelity International, it’s one of the coldest days of the year so far in Europe, with temperatures in some parts dropping as low as -10°C. It’s representative of the mood that has swept over the crypto industry in the past year, undergoing a winter of its own. In part that has been affected by unfavourable economic conditions, price volatility, and the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and crypto lender Genesis.

Retaining investor confidence in crypto, then, could be seen as an unenviable task. For Luc Froehlich, Global Head of Digital Asset Solutions at Fidelity International, it was a challenge he wanted to take on, being an early adopter of crypto. Froehlich, who talks to me from his office in Hong Kong, started investing in bitcoin back in 2015 – the early days, so to speak, for a sector that has moved with pace in such a short period of time.

Froehlich has a background as a credit analyst, trader and a fund manager, working for industry heavyweights like Credit Suisse and Manulife Asset Management. Cryptocurrencies were still an incredibly new frontier at that time. In 2016 and 2017, shortly after Froehlich took a step into crypto investing, a wave of initial coin offerings (ICO) started coming out. Froehlich says, over the next couple of years, he underwent an “educational journey” – and senior leaders at Fidelity, whom he joined in 2016, started becoming more vocal about the potential for cryptocurrency.

He believes that a lot has matured in the space since those halcyon days, sparked by the increasing mainstreaming of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. In the beginning, crypto was the preserve of geeks and tech nerds – but in the last couple of years, it’s started to attract the attention of those in the traditional finance space.

“You have a space that is more professional, with quite a few people coming from a traditional finance background. There is definitely much more of a focus on real-world applications now – how can distributed ledger technology, in particular blockchain, be used to solve day-to-day problems?

That makes it a slightly less exotic space but more interesting in the sense that it's an opportunity to showcase how blockchain is not just a buzzword or a fad.”

Fidelity’s strong culture of innovation

The part of Fidelity’s business headed up by Froehlich focuses on digital assets and only started at the beginning of 2022, but it was the culmination of a long journey into decentralised assets. Not only was Fidelity seeking to enter the digital assets space, it was striving to future-proof its business

Luc Froehlich

TITLE: GLOBAL HEAD OF DIGITAL ASSET SOLUTIONS

COMPANY: FIDELITY INTERNATIONAL

INDUSTRY: FINANCIAL SERVICES

LOCATION: HONG KONG SAR

Luc is the Global Head of Digital Assets at Fidelity International, where he spearheads the firm's digital assets and cryptocurrencies strategy and engages with institutional investors.

Along with his role at Fidelity, Luc has worked with the World Economic Forum on workstreams related to distributed ledger technology, central bank digital currencies and stablecoins. He has also been advising fintech start-ups in the cryptocurrency and tokenisation space and is a guest lecturer on digital assets at several universities.

Before joining Fidelity, Luc was a portfolio manager, managing money for central banks and pension funds; he was a trader in credit derivatives and started his career as a credit analyst.