My colleague Emma Dunkley is the FT's asset management reporter.

That means she writes a lot about the major asset managers, groups like Vanguard and BlackRock.

These are all massive financial institutions, so she's pretty used to seeing some big figures when she reports on these companies' annual results.

But earlier this year, she came across something that surprised even her.

So we saw some staggering numbers, as one of the financial services firms in the US reported

$32.7 billion of revenues last year.

And we were actually blown away by this because the revenues turned out to be 50% or so

more than the amount that BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, had reported.

And that wasn't the only figure that surprised her.

And then in the second quarter of this year, the company showed assets under management

of $6.4 trillion, which positions it as one of the largest asset managers globally.

These figures come from the U.S.-based group, Fidelity Investments.

Now, Emma knew Fidelity a bit, but not as well as some of its competitors she covers regularly.

I knew it was a large asset manager in the US, but they certainly don't caught attention

like their higher profile rivals.

And that got me and the editor's thinking, we don't actually do a huge amount on Fidelity

and they're not hugely well known.

So we thought, how does it make its money and what is its secret source?

So we decided, let's dig into Fidelity.

I'm Mikhaila Tendera from The Financial Times. Today on Behind the Money, how Fidelity

investments became a financial powerhouse while keeping a low profile.

Emma, welcome to the show. Thank you. To start off, let's talk a bit about this company's history, because something that I find quite interesting is that the company is today run by a woman named Abigail Johnson, who is the granddaughter of the group's founder, and in short, three generations have run this business.

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