Fidelity Investments’ National Financial officials say its Fidelity Clearing Canada affiliate has just begun operations.
"We see a growing demand for our U.S. based broker dealer customers who have moved into the Canadian marketplace," Richard Hart, senior vice president, National Financial, told CQ&D, which reported on the move this summer.
The Canadian based operation has signed up brokerage Integral Wealth Securities and execution specialist JitneyTrade for their clearing platform.
Hart added that the affiliate should be able to capture a large piece of the some 200 independent broker-dealers in Canada.
It expects to have eight to 12, "high volume, institutional customers" in the next year, said Richard Ness, acting chief executive of Fidelity Clearing Canada.
He estimated that reaching that goal would give the new business somewhere between 4 percent and 8 percent market share.
In that effort, the new Fidelity business will be butting heads with some clearing heavyweights. These include Penson Financial, TD Bank and the National Bank of Canada.
Fidelity officials said they would stress the risk management capabilities of their clearing services.
"We think there is a lot of room up here for non-bank clearing firms," Hart said "We are solely focused on clearing and in this space we’ll bring a very large reputation," Ness added.
