Portfolio

College alumni may soon be plumbed as yet another new distribution channel for mutual funds.

A publishing company that specializes in offering advice on how to invest in direct investment plans is getting into the fund business.

Prudential Investments is teaming up with BISYS to provide two new retirement plans for small businesses.

Wells Fargo and MassMutual Retirement Services are teaming up to create a new pension service with online capabilities. The new pension program will include administration, actuarial, trustee and investment management services. It will also offer Internet-based communication and administration services. For example, participants will be able to calculate their projected retirement benefits online. The new service will be available to defined benefit plans with a minimum of $2 million in assets at the beginning of 1999.

Morningstar is introducing investment information and analysis aimed at the retail Japanese mutual fund industry. The new products are being introduced by Morningstar Japan K.K., a collaboration between Morningstar and Softbank Corp., an information and software company based in Tokyo. On October 26, Morningstar Chief Executive Officer Don Phillips will be in Tokyo along with Yoshitaka Kitao, president and chief executive officer of Morningstar Japan, who is also CEO of Softbank, to talk about the new products. Using Morningstar's U.S. operations as a model, Morningstar Japan plans to publish investment research and analysis for Japanese investors and financial professionals. Softbank also has a major stake in the U.S. Internet businesses, Yahoo! Inc. and GeoCities.

Confluence Technologies has released the latest version of its flagship mutual fund software, FundStation Version 4.30. The new version will be able to translate performance data into euros, when that currency is adopted. It also allows companies to easily transfer their data to CTCI 2.0, NASDAQ's new message format for daily and year-end reporting of mutual fund information.

Major fund companies are not likely to embrace Cuba as the antidote to the outflow of assets from their equity funds, but one Miami-based company hopes to be the first into a market it believes is destined to take off.

The Presbyterian Church is creating a family of mutual funds in which its affiliated colleges, schools and congregations can invest the money they raise.

New England Financial (NEF) is creating a new computer-based personal money management tool to be known as the Electronic Money Management Account. All money placed in the account will be invested in a money market fund offered through New England Securities Corp., an affiliate.

Employees are logging onto the Internet and their internal company intranets increasingly to check on their defined contribution plans.