Money Management Executive Latest News

The latest wealth management acquisition by Bank of Montreal will expand its mutual fund reach in Canada to include funds sold through independent advisors not affiliated with the bank.

Software companies that have developed products to help fund firms calculate after-tax returns might logically have been chagrined when Paul Roye, director of the SEC's division of investment management, announced last month that legislation on Capital Hill may render moot a Securities and Exchange Commission regulation requiring fund companies to report after-tax returns that takes effect in October.

In January and February, when the market was falling, brokers were pleading with our wholesalers for help, said Kristine McManus, vice president of sales development with John Hancock Funds of Boston. McManus runs the John Hancock Business Development Institute which designs 10 to 12 often generic sales tools, seminars, and programs each year to help brokers build their businesses,McManus said.

When DST Systems of Kansas City, Mo. surveyed the financial intermediaries that use the company's advisor website to pinpoint what was missing from it, the consensus was variable annuity complexes, according to Kyle Mallot, client services officer at DST. Consequently, in January, the company added a variable annuity interface to the site and signed up the annuities operation of the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne, Ind. as the first company to provide data to the site.

The board of directors of the almost nine-year-old $46 million Jensen Portfolio is asking shareholders to approve a new 0.10 percent 12b-1 fee and change the fund adviser's mandatory expense reimbursement agreement to a voluntary arrangement.

Marking a shift in its distribution strategy, Brinson Advisors of New York, the wholesale distribution arm of UBS Asset Management of Chicago, has renamed roughly 40 mutual funds, the company announced.

Three Merrill Lynch portfolio managers working in the firm's Los Angeles office have resigned, a company spokesperson said last week.

AIM Private Asset Management, a subsidiary of AIM Management Group of Houston will distribute three of the six portfolios it offers through Brinker Capital of King of Prussia, Pa., AIM announced last week.

A district court judge in Connecticut issued an emergency order earlier this month freezing the assets of Ian Renert and Hawthorne Sterling & Company, an unregistered investment adviser in Wilton, Conn., according to the SEC.

ING Group of New York announced yesterday that it will merge two of its entities, Aeltus Investment Management of Hartford, Conn. and ING Furman Selz Asset Management of New York, into a new institutional investment management firm called ING Aeltus Group.