Fidelity Investments’ June 19 announcement that it is seeking a wider role in the lucrative IPO market puts it right up against the investment banks with which it has long done business. They sell primarily to institutional investors such as pension funds – big, sophisticated customers that are structurally very efficient, at least compared to the retail market. The investment banks benefit from fees in the range of 6 percent; the investors to whom they sell benefit from post- offering market gains in the immediate aftermath of the offerings.

With 20 million customers, Fidelity is the largest retail broker in the world. It’s not an underwriter and says it doesn’t want to become one. But it wants a bigger piece of the pie, and with the electronic age shattering the technological barriers to entry in terms of ease of trading, it’s got a point.

Electronic IPOs are far less expensive and more nimble than the traditional way. Prices can be tested in advance and changed based on market response, though this would seem to widen the opportunity for insider price-fixing (but that’s a discussion for another day).

The push-down of investment opportunities to retail investors since the 1990s, as well as the demographic shifts that affect that age cohort, have been leading in this direction for at least two decades. Fidelity is going where its retail customers have long wanted to go.

Retail brokers have long complained of missing out on that post-offering IPO bump (and also make the same complaint about secondary offerings). Yes, the Facebook IPO was a notable exception, but one could say that there was too much pre-offering anticipation built into that deal. The way it more often goes is that retail brokers and their customers have to run for the leftovers when the IPO investors take their profits and sell.

Fidelity’s sally-forth has everything to do with who gets to set the offering price, and when. The federal JOBS Act of 2012 eased capital-raising regulations for companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. Online fundraising markets are making themselves known.

But one more thing, as Detective Columbo used to say – how much capital does any particular company actually need at an IPO? No management team wants to be castigated by its new shareholders because it asked for what may look like “too little.” But the history of IPOs is fraught with the stories of “too much” – companies that got windfalls and then realized that they would have trouble efficiently deploying it all, whether in hiring, investing in property, plant and equipment, or bringing products to market – in order to match quarterly investor expectations. Maybe electronic IPOs will help refine this.

Fidelity’s push to provide more of its clients with IPO shares probably would have come decades sooner if technology had been up to the task. Now we’re here, and we’ve got to take a closer look at who gets to invest and when. Let’s hope there isn’t too much bloodshed.