Industry

Lowell Asset Management and Pearl Funds Management, both of Melbourne, Australia, will merge. Lowell has $50 million under management, while Pearl has $35 million. The terms of the deal call for Pearl to acquire cash and shares in Lowell. The companies did not reveal the value of the deal or the name of the merged entity.

NEW YORK The value of mergers and acquisitions among investment management companies, including mutual funds, has increased nearly seven-fold in the past eight years and it is expected to continue to grow at a robust pace.

Bank One Investment Advisors Corp. of Columbus, Ohio, has merged its One Group Family of Mutual Funds with the Pegasus Funds, which belonged to First Chicago NBD Corp. Bank One and First Chicago merged in October 1998. The merged fund family now has 48 funds with $56.2 billion in assets under management. Merging the two funds took a good deal of work since Pegasus had 30 funds and One Group had 34 funds, said Bank One chairman and ceo David Kundert. However, no funds were completely eliminated, Kundert said. "Funds with similar objectives were merged," the chairman said. "We chose the best of the best and have ended up with a stronger overall family that carries with it a very strong series of Morningstar ratings and broad styles to satisfy every investor's need."

SEI Investment Co. of Oaks Park, Pa. has joined with the International Finance Corp. and Tong Yang Securities of Seoul, Korea, to form an asset management group called SEI Asset Korea.

The Institute of Certified Financial Planners (ICFP) of Denver and the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP) of Atlanta have agreed to merge. They have tentatively decided to call the new entity the Financial Planning Association. Combined, the new association could have a very large membership ICFP currently has 14,500 members and IAFP has 17,000.

Merrill Corp. of St. Paul, Minn. has acquired Daniels Printing of Boston. The deal makes Daniels, an 118-year-old company which had been family-owned, part of a public company. The new company will be called Merrill/Daniels. Merrill hopes that the acquisition will shore up its New England operations. Daniels, with over $68 million in revenue in 1998, is the fourth largest financial printer in the U.S. and has 375 employees. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

With widespread consolidation in the mutual fund industry, many industry observers have predicted the demise of mid- to-small-sized fund companies.

Opposites attract and when they do, adjustments need to be made as will no doubt be the case with the mutual fund families of BankBoston and Fleet Bank.

Phoenix Investment Partners of Hartford has completed its acquisition of the mutual fund business of Zweig Fund Group of New York for $135 million plus up to $29 million over the next three years, depending on revenue growth. With this acquisition, Phoenix has renamed the Zweig and Euclid open-end mutual funds the Phoenix-Zweig Funds and Phoenix-Euclid Funds. Phoenix currently has $57.5 billion of assets under management.

Following its acquisition of the right to manage and distribute all of Nicholas-Applegate's open-end funds, Pilgrim American Capital Corporation has placed its own name on those funds. Pilgrim made the change after obtaining approval from the Nicholas-Applegate board of trustees.