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First Trust Corp. of Denver has created a program whereby employers can offer employees as many as 2,000 mutual funds from 200 fund families for their 401(k), 403(b) or 457 savings plans. First Trust is calling the new program OptionsPlus.

AIM Advisors of Houston has introduced Class B and Class C shares for its AIM Large Cap Growth Fund.

For the first time, an SEC judge has set some limits on what expenses a mutual fund can include as part of its Rule 12b-1 fee.

Stein Roe Mutual Funds of Chicago has launched the Stein Roe Growth Investor Fund, a no-load, multi-cap growth fund. The fund will mimic the Stein Roe Young Investor Fund, which delivered a 17.65 percent return in 1998. David Brady and Erik Gustafson, who have co-managed the Young Investor fund, will also assume responsibility for the Growth Investor Fund.

The mutual fund industry has been slow to adopt the summary or "profile" prospectus in part because of a desire to make salespeople indispensable.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has added a calculator to its website that allows investors to determine the total costs of investing in any given mutual fund.

ICI Mutual Insurance Company, a leading provider of liability insurance for mutual fund directors, has revised its insurance coverage in an effort to provide independent directors with more protection in disputes with fund advisers.

Branching into the retail retirement services business, American General Financial Group is creating a family of 23 mutual funds called the American General Fund Group.

Scudder Kemper Investments of Boston has introduced the Scudder Select 500 Fund and the Scudder Select 1000 Growth Fund, two funds meant to offer no-load investors an institutional money management approach. The first fund will be benchmarked against the S&P 500 and the second, the Russell 1000.

The BISYS Group, a mutual fund distribution and administration company based in Little Falls, New Jersey, has acquired EXAMCO, a New Orleans company that trains financial services employees over the Internet.

OppenheimerFunds of New York has acquired Trinity Investment Management Corp., an institutional money manager in Boston with $7.5 billion in assets under management.

The BISYS Group of Little Falls, N.J. has acquired the mutual fund administration business of Bachmann Asset Management Ltd. of Guernsey, Channel Islands. BISYS said it made the acquisition because of its own growing outsourcing business. The acquisition will add to its administrative capabilities.

Groupama Asset Management of New York, an investment management firm, will launch its first mutual fund, a large-cap growth fund, to gain a broader U.S. customer base for the company. The fund, to be called the GAMNA Focus Fund, is in registration with the SEC. Groupama Asset Management is a division of the French insurance conglomerate Groupama.

SEC examiners have begun informally questioning mutual fund companies on what their funds spend and receive for executing securities trades.

A recent agreement struck between "Big Five" accounting firm Deloitte & Touche and the SEC has captured the attention of both the accounting and mutual fund industries. At issue is just how far removed members of an accounting firm chosen to audit specific mutual funds must be to protect objectivity and maintain true independence.

A series of legal challenges to the mutual fund industry's system of independent directors has suffered another setback.

Insurance companies are building their mutual fund sales, hoping to take advantage of the increasing interest in these investment vehicles and the pending explosion in retirement savings, industry experts say. Insurance firms are drawing on the strength of their established variable annuity distribution systems to compete with full-service investment houses.

It might appear that consolidation is occurring in the financial printing world for the same reasons it is in the money management arena. But while consolidation in the money management and mutual fund industry has mainly been done to combine distribution strengths, that is not the case in the financial printing world.

IDEX Mutual Funds of St. Petersburg, Fla., has added five new funds to its family: IDEX T. Rowe Price Dividend Growth, IDEX T. Rowe Price Small-Cap, IDEX Pilgrim Baxter Mid-Cap Growth, IDEX Salomon All-Cap and IDEX Goldman Sachs Growth. The names include the sub-adviser on each fund. IDEX is also including the names of its sub-advisers on the 13 other existing funds in its family.

Lowell Asset Management and Pearl Funds Management, both of Melbourne, Australia, will merge. Lowell has $50 million under management, while Pearl has $35 million. The terms of the deal call for Pearl to acquire cash and shares in Lowell. The companies did not reveal the value of the deal or the name of the merged entity.