Money Management Executive Latest News

At the request of the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, the General Accountability Office will review two divisions of the Securities and Exchange Commission—the enforcement unit and the office of compliance, inspections and examinations, The New York Times reports.

Mutual fund assets surpassed the $10 trillion mark for the first time, reaching $10.32 billion, data from Bobroff Consulting and Lipper shows.

Once upon a time, mutual fund complexes were the cash cows of their annuity company parents. Not anymore.

While the cost of a college education increases every year, far too few parents are saving for their children's future. As a result, more mutual fund companies, recognizing the need for parents to prepare, are training advisers to discuss college savings plans with parents and grandparents.

NEW YORK-Fidelity Investments is playing with-and off-investors' emotions. And when it comes to retirement planning, more often than not, those emotions are negative.

While automatically enrolling workers in a 401(k) plan typically results in 90% participation, up from 68%, workers tend to keep contribution rates at the default level-and as a result will be ill-prepared for retirement. This is according to an analysis of 2.6 million 401(k) participants by Hewitt Associates.

Transamerica Retirement Services has added 50 investment options to its retirement platform, the largest number it has ever added at one time. In so doing, the platform now has a total of 144 options from 30 investment companies, Transamerica said, creating "one of the most robust retirement plan solutions for small- to mid-size businesses."

Envision Promotes Kan to President, Jones to EVP

A little discussed provision of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, which President Bush signed into law this past August, has investment management firms scrambling to understand its full ramifications.

Now that brokerage firms have had a full year to comply with new supervisory control regulations from the New York Stock Exchange and the NASD, they can reflect on lessons learned and how, going forward, their chief executive officers can do a better job of setting, testing and supervising compliance controls. This is according to a Deloitte & Touche webcast last week: "Supervisory Control Regulations for Broker/Dealers: Compliance in the Second Year and Beyond."