Fidelity Investments announced Tuesday that it has updated its iPhone, iPad and Android apps with a feature that allows investors to use the GPS on their phones to locate investment opportunities nearby. With the new feature, users can find publicly traded companies on a map with their ticker symbol and the most recent price.
"What we're trying to do is provide our customers with different options for discovering their next investment opportunity. This one's a play on Yelp or what Uber and a lot of these other apps are doing; they're using location as another discovery option," Velia Carboni, senior vice president of the mobile channel at Fidelity, said in an interview on Tuesday.
"It's not meant to lead to a trade," Carboni said. "It's more meant to be a discovery tool. Obviously we want them to do more research after that."
The app does, however, allow investors to trade stocks, options, mutual funds and ETFs from the app.
In addition to the new feature, Fidelity also announced other updates to the apps. Users on all platforms can conduct single- and multi-leg option trades and trade specific shares with a more streamlined interface designed for a small screen.
