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Advisors should heed how the bank is leveraging new technology to converse with customers online.

With mergers heating up, Kessel D. Stelling says "every bank has to earn their independence every day." His company, Synovus Financial, paid a steep price toward that end Monday.

As directors and officers of failed banks brace for FDIC lawsuits, an intense legal battle is developing over accessing files at their former institutions.

With wealthy under-50 investors making up 29% of total affluent investors in the United States – and growing - the big question for wealth management firms is how to gain more wallet-share from this critical client segment.

The Bank of America unit Trust has appointed five new advisors in Illinois and Texas to focus on ultra-high net worth clients.

HighTower has expanded its New York team by merging with the business of Steve Bogner, a former Morgan Stanley Smith Barney advisor who manages $80 million in client assets.

Fixed annuities sales were steady at $1.1 billion, whereas variable annuities gained $100 million from a month earlier ending November at $1.5 billion, according to data from Kehrer-LIMRA.

In 2008, Oxford University Press published the first history of mutual funds, THE RISE OF MUTUAL FUNDS: AN INSIDER’S VIEW, by Matthew P. Fink, former president of the Investment Company Institute. Oxford has just published a new paperback edition, updated to cover the 2008 financial crisis and its impact on mutual funds. The following is the Preface to the new edition.

Strong sales over the past year prove that Americans are looking for guaranteed income.

Fidelity announced Monday that the lifetime income variable annuity that it offers through MetLife, the MetLife Growth and Guaranteed Income annuity, has attracted more than $1 billion in sales since it was first offered a year ago.

Older Americans are worried about numerous factors affecting their financial security and, thus, are very skeptical of financial planners who say they are building portfolios for them to mitigate risk, research by Hearts & Wallets found through nine focus groups across the country.

NEW YORK-The U.S. economy will muddle through even as domestic stocks rake in double-digit percentage returns for the third straight year, said Robert C. Doll, the chief equity strategist for fundamental equities at BlackRock, in a breakfast briefing in New York Tuesday.

Equity funds delivered 16.57% in 2010, with more than one-third of the gains, 6.43%, coming in during the last five weeks of the year, Lipper said.

Wall Street may not exactly be on a roll, but at least it's beginning to rumble.

The mutual fund industry typically focuses on weekly and monthly fund flow figures.

Putnam Investments has promoted Robert E. Alan to head of North American consultant relations and Keith E. Thomas to head of international consultant relations. The two will work with the consultants who advise institutional investors on investment strategy and the selection of managers.

The Insured Retirement Industry has hired Lisa Plotnick as director of research, a new position IRI has created to establish itself as a research leader.

Morningstar announced Monday that its chief operating officer, Tao Huang is leaving the company at the end of the month.

The Chicago-based company said that Huang, 48, will continue to serve as a management advisor to the firm.

The deal, which was announced in October, was priced at $88.57 million inclusive of estimated net assets of the business of $21.75 million.