Ex-TV writer hopes she’s found new bonanza online

Just sit right back and you’ll read a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…how a scriptwriter for “Gilligan’s Island,” “Bewitched” and “Bonanza” wound up building a cash management business for financial advisers.

Last fall, Kathryn Heily, a TV writer-cum-money manager, unveiled an online supermarket that provides access to 300 money market mutual funds through 40 companies, including Putnam Investments and J.P. Morgan & Co.

Institutional investors, banks, municipalities and wealthy investors can use the service to quickly compare funds so they can trade in and out to capture the best yields. They can also check yields and their balances in real time.

Financial advisers can use the service too, says Ms. Heily, whose 10-year-old San Francisco firm, Capital Network Services, holds $2.8 billion in custody. “We’re offering a product that saves advisers and RIAs a lot of time and money,” she says.

How Ms. Heily, 63, got to this place in her life seems as improbable as an episode of the shows she contributed to. Because she “isn’t an L.A. person,” she says, she ditched a budding contract career in television scriptwriting more than 30 years ago to become a stockbroker in San Francisco for Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc.

wanted to stay by the bay

She says she abandoned her creative ambitions when Los Angeles beckoned.”I knew I wanted to stay in the Bay Area, so I started reviewing my options,” she says, which included turning to law or finance.

Not having the time or patience to sit through law school, she eventually decided to contact Merrill Lynch for a job. Her contact, an executive vice president, gave her a spot in Merrill’s registered rep program — reluctantly, she says.

She says she was the first woman in the program, but it wasn’t easy for anyone involved.

“The other trainees would leave me in another room during their joke telling.” During her early years at Merrill, in the late ’60s, she says, she was”excluded from men’s clubs and even had to ride up in the service elevator.”

Ms. Heily would ultimately go it alone in 1990, but not before working for 18 years as a vice president at Merrill and becoming the first female partner at San Francisco investment bank Hambrecht & Quist, which remains the largest customer of her firm.

Says Ms. Heily, “all the guys [at H&Q] stared at me at first, but they got over it.”

These days, Ms. Heily is busy drumming up new customers, more of whom she hopes will be advisers. “Using [CNS’s] service alleviates the need for advisers to shop around at banks, brokers and other financial institutions to find superior yields for their clients,” she says. Another way CNS makes things easy, she says, is by providing each client one account number, one monthly statement, and access to one of the company’s 10 account reps.

The service, which Ms. Heily says is boosting business dramatically, is free to investors. CNS is paid out of the expense ratio of the fund families, or 12(b)1 fees, which pay the firm between 0.05% and 0.8%, depending on the class of the fund (0.05 percentage points for A shares; 0.80 points for C, or retail, shares).

free Same-day transfers

The firm also allows free same-day money transfers. “We don’t need to charge redemption fees,” Ms. Heily explains. “We’re paid on our average daily balance, so it doesn’t really matter.”

Consolidating the choices of money market funds makes life a lot easier, says John Fisher, principal of San Francisco investment bank Fisher & Co. and a CNS customer for seven years. “All the major investment banks and investment houses maintain a walled garden where you only get to invest in their own proprietary cash fund products.”

According to the Investment Company Institute in Washington, assets of the nation’s retail money market mutual funds currently stand at about $949 billion.

Diane Larson, a San Francisco adviser, says CNS enables “my clients to maximize their free cash. And they are finding better yields than money market yields attached to brokerage accounts. It’s much more an institutional yield as opposed to a retail-like yield.”

So far, she says, she has routed $50 million to CNS. “It’s a great service model.”