Abigail Johnson, known to all as Abby, runs her family's old-school asset management firm with a focus on alternative investments that couldn't even be traded on an exchange a year ago.
Fidelity Digital Assets, which provides custodial and trading services for the crypto holdings of institutional and high-net worth clients, operates as an independent subsidiary and has become a core contributor to the $6.4 trillion-asset company, which grew to $32.7 billion in 2024 revenues. (The company has about $16.4 trillion under administration.)
Leading the way is Fidelity's popular spot Bitcoin exchange traded fund, launched last year to great fanfare after this fledgling ETF category (in which managers like Fidelity directly hold Bitcoin for shareholders) gained SEC approval
The company has hired tens of thousands of new employees over the last five years, mostly to work in digital assets. This has allowed Fidelity to expand into diverse administrative roles for crypto, including estate and custodial duties for individuals' crypto fortunes, and to offer crypto investment options to millions of Fidelity 401(k) accountholders through their employers.
More recently the digital assets platform has produced its Fidelity Crypto for IRAs product as well as a tokenized treasury investment product for institutional investors, and introduced its digital stock transfer agent business for publicly traded companies. This year, Fidelity Digital Assets confirmed it is in the advanced stages of testing a stablecoin offering, a segment of the crypto ecosystem in which market prices for cryptocurrency like Tether are pegged to the US dollar.
All are the fruition of alternative products strategies driven by Johnson that began shortly after cryptocurrency and blockchain technology first entered the scene. More than a decade ago, her product development teams were already contemplating how Fidelity would fit into theoretical "frictionless" capital markets in which fees, barriers and costs to trading were diminished or eliminated. The impact of technology like Bitcoin and blockchain was "kind of actually what we were just talking about in our crazy scenario plan," Johnson told Bloomberg Markets in a 2018 interview. "Maybe we were onto something."
The focus on digital assets (which was established in 2018) has not taken the focus off sustaining Fidelity's major role in other brokerage, advisory and fund management business lines. In the health savings account market, for example, Fidelity continues to oversee one of the fastest growing offerings, having reached $34 billion under administration in early 2025. This past spring, Fidelity introduced custom model portfolios with alternatives for wealth management firms and also launched new ETFs, including two for municipal bonds. Fidelity ETF assets have climbed to $125.9 billion, as of second-quarter 2025.
Johnson, 63, has been Fidelity's CEO since 2014, when she succeeded her father, Ned Johnson, at the firm founded by her grandfather, Edward C. Johnson II, in 1946. She was named chair in 2016.
Fidelity remains privately owned, split between the family's 49% family's stakes (including about 28% for Abby Johnson, according to Forbes, producing most of her net worth estimated at $35 billion) with the remainder of Fidelity's interests owned by Fidelity employees.
