Money Management Executive Latest News

NEW YORK - Niche websites offering mutual funds provide fund firms struggling to compete in supermarkets an alternative distribution method with several advantages, according to fund executives.

In a rare but not unprecedented occurrence, the shareholders of a small fund are being asked to renew the fund's investment advisory contract, so that the advisor can be paid for the first time in nearly a year.

Transamerica Life Insurance Company of Canada fired three employees and suspended 17 in a trading scandal involving one of the firm's offshore funds based in Luxembourg, said Barry Francis, a spokesperson for the company.

FleetBoston of Boston and United Overseas Bank of Singapore have agreed to sell each other's funds in their respective markets.

AIM Funds Management of Toronto became Canada's newest foreign-owned mutual fund giant on Aug. 1, with the completion of its takeover of Trimark Financial of Toronto. It hopes to make further market-share gains by offering one of the country's most diverse product lines, introducing new low-fee share classes and expanding its distribution channels.

NEW YORK - The Internet has been a tremendous boon even for Fidelity Investments of Boston, the nation's No. 1 fund company, because it has raised Fidelity's awareness throughout the country, said Peter Costa, vice president, interactive content at Fidelity.

While Barclays Global Investors of San Francisco is hoping its iShares exchange-traded funds will grow far beyond their current $4 billion in assets under management, the firm does not expect that to happen overnight.

NEW YORK - The number of penta-millionaires will expand exponentially by 46 percent a year between now and 2004, bringing today's 590,000 penta-millionaire households to more than two million by 2004, according to new research by the Spectrem Group of San Francisco.

NEW YORK - U.S. mutual fund companies might want to take the lead from a handful of U.K. financial institutions that are merchandising and marketing funds, credit cards and stocks in a hip, irreverent style, as if they were consumer packaged goods.

Sixty-four percent of mutual fund companies intend to offer shareholders mobile Internet services in the next 12 months, according to a study released last week by kasina LLC, an Internet consulting company in New York.