Special Program Root Tag

Retirement plan participants are calming down, according to a Mass Mutual analysis of its plans.

The operator of a pan-European data network has deployed high-speed optical networking gear, to achieve trip times of 4.22 thousandths of a second between London and Frankfurt and 2.65 milliseconds between Paris and Brussels.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has given money market funds a reprieve from following an amendment to money market fund regulations requiring them to approve of the credit rating agencies they must use to determine whether a security is eligible for investment.

LIMRA announced Monday it has partnered with Smarsh, a provider of secure e-mail archiving solutions compliant with FINRA and Securities and Exchange Commission standards, to provide these services to its members.

Chris Gootkind is the latest addition at Loomis, Sayles & Co., where he has joined the firm’s fixed-income group as the director of credit research and a credit strategist.

Two advisor trade groups - the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and Financial Planning Coalition, which consists of the Certified Planner Board of Standards, the Financial Planning Association and the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors - finally sent in their comment letters to the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding Section 913 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, or what the Commission should do about enforcing a blanket fiduciary standard for all financial advisers.

Financial advisers rate Vanguard the No. 1 provider of exchange-traded funds, giving the company high marks on nine out of 10 metrics, Cogent Research found, in its 2010 Adviser Brandscape survey of 1,560 advisers. Vanguard rated a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 33%, compared to market share leader Barclays iShares’ 20%. NPS is a standardized loyalty metric developed by Bain & Co. and deployed across many industries, according to Cogent.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has announced that Christopher R. Conte, associate director in the division of enforcement, will leave his post at the regulator after 18 years.

LCH.Clearnet will cut fees for many customers by as much as two-thirds and eliminate charges for high-volume equity traders amidst the possible loss of key clients and growing competition in Europe’s post-trade clearing market.

Fund managers try to provide their institutional clients with best execution, but are falling short of the mark in one key area- back office settlement fees.

Mortgage-backed securities, especially those paying higher rates of interest than comparable Treasuries, are gaining an increased amount of attention from investors who have been sitting on cash.

Fidelity Investments has enhanced its custodial platform, WealthCentral, for registered investment advisors, so that it is now possible to create block orders from the portfolio modeling and rebalancing tool, as well as conduct searches more effectively.

Bloomberg says it has signed deals with an undisclosed number of operators of dark pools to allow asset managers and hedge fund customers to view in “real-time” how their trades have been matched in the pools.

“An educated customer is our best customer” has been the memorable slogan of Syms for four decades.

Buy-side firms and other market players want to expand the scope of transaction reporting to comply with European legislation on best execution to over-the-counter derivatives and introduce position reporting for OTC derivatives as well .

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Monday the appointment of John Ramsay as the regulator’s new deputy director in the Division of Trading and Markets.

Charles Schwab Corp. announced Monday that it has agreed to buy Windward Investment Management Inc., a Boston investment advisory firm.

In its ongoing effort to expand its middle-market defined contribution and defined benefit business, The Hartford has hired Denise Diana as VP, retirement plans mid-market.

A bill before Congress seeking to increase retirement savings among workers will unnecessarily overburden small employers, according to a new report from Aite Group.

Wall Street wirehouse bulge-bracket firms continue to top the list of sponsors of separately managed accounts for the second quarter of this year, according to a research report just issued by the Money Management Institute and Dover Financial Research.