Alessandro Vigilante has been vice-president of corporate business development at investment and financial services firm Fidelity’s strategic investments unit since January 2019, having previously worked for the company as head of global innovation ecosystem, head of US west coast innovation ecosystem and a financial technology adviser.
The strategic investments unit is still nascent, which was born by combining the mergers and acquisitions group with his former innovation ecosystem team according to Vigilante, who said: “The M&A team used to mainly look at peer acquisitions [as] organic growth but loved our inorganic origination capabilities, while we were mainly originating new tech vendors but loved the M&A team’s ability to bring equity to the table. We, therefore, joined forces to build an end-to-end capability to execute strategic investments.
“Our meaning of ‘strategic’ is that we must build a strong commercial partnership case with the target company before we consider an investment…there must be a business unit commitment – in the form a partnership revenue projection – to execute such commercial partnership.”
Since the two groups merged in early 2019, it has made five investments in companies including dental practice software developer CareStack, asset data analytics software developer Everledger and data-empowered passive investment portfolio building platform Ethic.
He said Fidelity’s business units allocate his team because their mandate is to execute deals to support the strategy set out by the workplace services and enterprise technology groups. This means he works with senior business unit executives on developing the thesis, in collaboration with VCs and the wider origination network to identify target companies.
Vigilante and his team are tasked with stretching the company into adjacent and transformational areas and establish deeper internal and external relationships with more strategically relevant individuals.
Among the deals, Vigilante considers the minority investment in Ethic to be one of the team’s great early successes. He said: “Impact investing is an emerging area where external capabilities and execution progress surpasses our internal capabilities and progress; as such, it is a great example of where a strategic partnership is allowing us to leapfrog.”
Vigilante holds a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the Polytechnic University of Milan and an MBA from SDA Bocconi School of Management.
