Money Management Executive Latest News

Independent Financial Marketing Group, Liberty Financial's bank distribution-arm, has hired Patrick Connelly as its senior VP of new business development.

Roger Engemann & Associates, a subsidiary of Phoenix Investment Partners, has hired Gretchen Lash as chief investment officer, the company announced yesterday. She is expected to begin in her new position in mid-October.

Fidelity Investments has appointed Christophe Gloser as director of its institutional fund management business in France, the company announced.

According to Mary Carrido, president of MLC & Associates of Port Orchard, Wash., an international disaster recovery consulting firm, it is not enough just to have a crisis plan for operating your business from an offsite location.

In the middle part of the last century, as the U.S. reeled from a tumultuous world war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued regular radio addresses to calm the nation. Bob Froelich, a well-known author who heads investment strategy for Zurich Scudder, hosted similar addresses last week for the same purpose.

The fund industry held its collective breath and prepared for the worst last Monday as markets reopened, but preliminary indications show that the levels of investor panic some firms may have feared did not materialize. Fund investors may have called fund companies or visited Web sites, but it does not appear they pulled significant amounts of money out of their funds.

Deutsche Bank announced today that it will acquire Zurich Scudder Investments for $2.5 billion. For its part, Zurich will acquire a 76% stake in Deutsche Bank’s Deutscher Herold and 100% of Deutsche Bank’s insurance interests in Spain, Portugal and Italy, an acquisition valued at $1.5 billion. Threadneedle Investments, Zurich’s U.K. asset management group, was not part of the deal and will remain with Zurich Scudder.

Several fund companies are seeking an extension of the Oct. 1 compliance date for after-tax return disclosure claiming that there are too many discrepancies in the methodologies used to compute after-tax returns.

The National Investment Company Service Association (NICSA) today launched the NICSA Online Learning Center and the Mutual Fund Industry Specialists (MFIS) Certificate Program.

Equity funds posted $8 billion in outflows for the month of August, the second worst month this year, as prolonged declines in stock prices put many fund investors in a state of unease, according to preliminary flow figures issued today by Lipper.