Industry

Wachovia Corp. agreed to acquire the retirement-services recordkeeping and third-party servicing business of PFPC, a member of The PNC Financial Services Group.

Faced with its weakest quarterly revenue level in over four years and running out of room to cut costs, Charles Schwab said it would look at other ways to increase income and shore up profits.

Margin pressures may hasten the pace of consolidation in the fund industry, indicates a report from Lipper of New York, issued last week.

The Bank of New York (BONY) has just signed managed account deals with insurance giant ING Group and a small North Carolina trust company to expand its managed account niche by supplying products to smaller companies and back-office services to larger ones.

If you ignored the fact that this tale involved mutual funds, it would read more like a soap opera.

AMR Corp. of Fort Worth, Texas, the parent company of American Airlines, is considering giving flight to its entire investment management unit, including its proprietary mutual fund unit.

As Wall Street's woes continue, mutual fund executives have come to think of their industry as a drawing on an Etch-A-Sketch. When it gets messed up, they can shake it up and draw it over again.

July

Many fund companies are at a crossroads, according to Charles O'Neill, president, Diversified Management Resources. In order to keep costs down, many complexes that built out during the boom years of the 1990s are going to have to drop part of their business and concentrate more on specific areas, O'Neill said. "Fund companies are going to have to decide essentially whether they are product distributors or product manufacturers. That's what it comes down to," O'Neill said.

If Wade Dokken, CEO of American Skandia, is a betting man, he may be about to lose his shirt. In March of this year, when MFMN asked him about the likelihood of a sale of the company, he responded, "I'll take all those side bets."