Money Management Executive Latest News

Shortly after he was married, Gino Heilizer, to his dismay, came across an unused rotary cheese grater that had been relegated to the bottom of a kitchen drawer. Surely, he thought, he and his wife were not the only newlyweds who had received more than a few frivolous wedding presents.

Invesco Funds Group of Denver, the global money manager with $350 billion in assets under management, is hiring six new wholesalers for its broker/dealer sales channel and has just filed a registration for the first of several new funds which will be sold exclusively in the financial intermediary channel.

Quant Funds of Lincoln, Mass. on May 1 became the second mutual fund company in the industry to allow investors to open accounts online, without paper applications or handwritten or digital signatures.

Folio[fn], a broker/dealer in Vienna, Va., is planning to offer a new kind of investment that is a hybrid between a mutual fund and a discount brokerage account.

Even though international equity funds staged an impressive performance comeback in 1999 after dismal returns in the previous 10 years, international funds' average six percent decline so far this year has caused some investor disenchantment. As a result, a number of fund companies, including Scudder Kemper Investments of Boston, are changing or even closing their international funds.

A hearing held May 1 on a request by Scudder Kemper Investments of Boston for a preliminary injunction against Robert Hoffman, Scudder's former managing director, gave no clues as to the possible outcome of pending arbitration between the two parties, according to an industry lawyer.

Both Prudential Investments of Newark, N.J., and Delaware Investments of Philadelphia have announced major realignments for their mutual fund management divisions. Prudential will be uniting two asset management divisions while Delaware will be separating its retail fund management business from its institutional business.

ATLANTA - When selecting an asset manager for an annuity sub-account, insurance companies need to look beyond performance figures and brand recognition if they want to offer a unique product line that is highly marketable, according to fund and insurance executives.

Top broker-dealers posted gains selling a combination of packaged mutual fund and annuity products in banks in 1999 despite overall sales declines in the bank channel, according to a report released by Ken Kehrer Associates, an independent consulting firm based in Princeton, N.J. that specializes in bank securities data.

The world of exchange-traded funds - so far dominated by two of the money management industry's largest players - is about to get an unconventional competitor.