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The Basel III bank capital requirements proposed earlier this month threaten to eviscerate the supply of eligible investments for tax-free money market funds — an industry already struggling with a severe supply shortage.

FINRA is proposing all-public arbitration panels in a rule it’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission next month, following a two-year pilot program.

Vanguard Group plans to simplify its Target Retirement Funds and certain other funds-of-funds in an effort to improve the products’ international diversification.The Valley Forge, Pa., company plans to replace the funds' three underlying international portfolios with a single broad international stock index fund. Vanguard will also increase the overall international equity exposure of these funds.

Putnam Investments announced Monday it launched a suite of multi-cap equity funds.

Fidelity Investments has added a Bank Deposit Portfolio to its five direct-sold 529 college savings plans: New Hampshire’s UNIQUE College Investing Plan, California’s ScholarShare College Savings Plan, Massachusetts’ U.Fund College Investing Plan, the Delaware College Investment Plan and the Fidelity Arizona College Savings Plan.

Temenos said late Monday that it will acquire Odyssey Financial Technologies, a supplier of front- and middle-office software for private banking, wealth management and investment management.

Retirement is being rejected by a new breed of wealthy workers.

Sophis said it established a partnership with a cluster, grid and cloud management software firm, to help investment managers disribute "resource-hungry" calculations such as risk simulations.

Throughout the turbulence of the credit crisis, fund companies have repeatedly told customers to continue to have faith, stick to their guns and remain steadfast buy-and-hold investors.

High-balance retirement plan participants aren't showing much loyalty to plan providers when rolling assets into an individual retirement account-yet this could signal room for improvement for 401(k) plans and their advisers.

You can put compliance into your computing cloud. But the cloud can't do the compliance for you.

Columbia Management has added two key staff members to the defined contribution investment only (DCIO) business and consultant relations.

As the fund-of-hedge funds industry witnesses a decline in assets under management, savvy managers and their service providers are quickly embracing greater automation to ensure they can aggregate tons of data on underlying funds and their managers, and deliver that data to institutional and individual investors.

Assets in exchange-traded funds have nearly tripled in the past five years, from $302 billion at the end of 2005 to $819 billion at the beginning of this month. Year-to-date 2010 through August, investors have pulled $29 billion from traditional US equity mutual funds, while ETFs have seen $40.8 billion in inflows. Since risk aversion is rampant at present, what is driving this tremendous and curious interest in ETFs? Can this momentum continue to catapult ETFs to a second big wave of growth?

Since the collapse of credit and complex derivatives markets in 2008, outsourcing of middle-office functions by investment companies has been growing at a clip of around 25% a year. State Street estimates the rate of adoption of outsourcing among the 150 largest asset managers will double over the next three to five years.

Used optimally, compensation is a powerful tool for recruiting, motivating and rewarding your sales team. Used poorly, it can discourage employees and frustrate company strategy.

In its latest global outlook, Barclays Capital said there is little chance for a double-dip recession and the recent economic slowdown is typical four-to-six quarters into a recovery.

The Hartford Mutual Funds will permanently reduce fees on six of its fixed income funds, effective Nov. 1. The biggest reduction is in the gross expenses on share Class A on The Hartford High Yield Fund, which are being reduced by 15 basis points to 1.25%. The other funds are seeing reductions in fees of between two basis points and 10 basis points.

Standard & Poor’s has launched a new U.S. Mutual Fund Excellence Awards program to recognize those funds that consistently achieve the highest ranking in S&P’s five-star rating system.

ETFdb.com, an information source and database of exchange traded funds, has launched a free conversion tool that allows investors and advisors to map current mutual-fund holdings to their equivalent ETFs, which typically have cheaper expense ratios and are easier to trade.