Money Management Executive Latest News

MIAMI – Aside from microscopic pie charts on diversification in shareholder hand-outs, the fund industry has failed to properly educate investors about the downsides of risk during the great bull run of the 1990s, according to Donald A. McMullen, Jr., senior executive vice president of Wachovia Corp. McMullen made his remarks at his keynote speech this morning here at the National Investment Company Services Association's 21st Annual Operations Conference.

Mutual Fund giant Fidelity Investments said on Monday that its net income plummeted 39% last year amid a rocky investment climate and suffering retirement accounts.

Prudential Financial and Wachovia have agreed to a joint venture, merging the firm’s retail brokerages. The combined forces represent $537 billion in client assets and estimated net revenue of $4.2 billion in 2002. The deal is set to close in the third quarter of this year.

Corporate Pension Plans Favor Bundled Services

The decision whether to internally handle mutual funds' back-office administrative tasks, such as fund accounting, transfer agency and communications with shareholders, or hand these tasks over to outside service providers is far from new. The debate continues, however, heatedly in this prolonged market downturn, over whether outsourcing or "insourcing" of routine yet important services provides more efficiencies and cost benefits continues.

As the interaction between fund companies and intermediaries and investors is evolving, call and contact centers are undergoing a continual facelift.

Oregon, Minnesota, Kansas, Florida - these have always been mutual fund companies' middle-America domains when it comes to cost-effective call centers.

Investors are feeling better about the quality of service they're getting from U.S. fund shops according to the latest shareholder survey by the National Investment Company Service Association (NICSA). But with just over half of all respondents saying they are pleased with the service they are getting, there's still plenty of room for improvement .

While e-mail and corporate Web sites are nothing new, fully mastering their capabilities to interact with intermediaries and clients is still very much a work in progress - and many financial companies still just don't get it.

Securities regulators and members of Congress have found a new investor-betrayal issue to wrangle over: mutual fund "breakpoints."