Product Watch: Fidelity adding fund options to its Advisor 529 plan

Fidelity Investments Institutional Services Co., a unit of Boston’s Fidelity Investments, has doubled the amount of Fidelity Advisor fund investment options available to the Advisor College Investing Plan.

The college plan will allow investors to work with their broker or adviser to select from among 10 additional individual Fidelity Advisor funds. Investors can choose any combination of the 20 investment options.

The 10 new options will cover varied asset classes, from money market to fixed income to equity. Funds offered will include the Dividend Growth Fund, the Value Strategies Fund, the Equity Income Fund and the Intermediate Bond Fund.

The 529 plan, sold by intermediaries, is sponsored by New Hampshire and managed by Fidelity Investments. The new investment options are expected to be available this summer.

Investment tool added by Manulife

Manulife Financial Corp.’s U.S. division in Boston has introduced I: evaluator, a web-based tool for evaluating investment options. It allows financial advisers to provide plan sponsors with customized evaluations of funds available to their companies.

The funds are available through a group annuity contract from Manufacturers Life Insurance Co. of Toronto. Features of I: evaluator include:

* Customized reports that rank funds according to criteria identified by plan sponsors.

* Measures of manager adherence to stated investment styles, fund performance, investment risk and fees.

* Comparison of investment options available from Manulife Financial with funds tracked by Morningstar Inc. of Chicago.

Website provider adds link for 401(k)s

AdvisorSquare Inc. of Torrance, Calif., a provider of websites for financial advisers, has aligned with 401kExchange.com of West Palm Beach, Fla., a web-based service for the 401(k) retirement market.

AdvisorSquare customers can access a database of companies nationwide for targeted marketing and communication purposes. Subscribers can streamline their gathering of 401(k) plan proposals, do comparative analysis and conduct due diligence by using 401kExchange.com’s online tools to process their requests for proposals.

Fremont offering new growth fund

Fremont Investment Advisors of San Francisco has launched the Fremont New Era Growth Fund, a no-load fund. The fund seeks capital appreciation by investing in large-cap U.S. companies that are considered market leaders with strong growth potential.

The minimum for a direct investment is $2,000 for a taxable account and $1,000 for an IRA or a Coverdell Education Savings Account.

ING unit offers variable life plan

Security Life of Denver Insurance Co., a division of ING U.S. Financial Services in Atlanta, has added Strategic Investor VUL, a variable universal life insurance product. It is designed for independent financial advisers to distribute to individual investors and owners of small and midsize businesses.

Features include:

* A mortality-and-expense charge that decreases as the account value increases.

* High early cash value.

* An adjustable-term insurance rider.

* A refund of sales charges and no surrender charges.

* Thirty-seven variable investment options.

* Three death-benefit options and multiple commission structures.

JPMorgan expands compliance service

JPMorgan Investor Services in New York has launched third-party compliance capabilities for mutual funds within its compliance reporting services platform. JPMorgan now provides customization of rules and reports, and the reduction of manual compliance checks.

Clients can reduce their operational risk by outsourcing the risk management to JPMorgan without purchasing new software or having vendor hardware at their desk. In addition, the service allows data from a third party to be fed into JPMorgan’s systems and analyzed before being is sent to the client.

Clients receive customized reports that can be viewed on JPMorgan’s clients-only website. JPMorgan provides compliance services to clients who use the JPMorgan accounting platform.

Third-party reporting capabilities and compliance reporting services are integrated with other risk-management products and aligned with the JPMorgan performance, analytics and consulting group.

GE Financial adds a retirement plan

GE Financial Assurance, the Richmond, Va.-based consumer insurance and investment arm of General Electric Capital Corp., now offers the GE Retirement Answer. The product, underwritten by GE Life and Annuity, guarantees minimum monthly payments for the rest of the insured party’s life.

A policy owner will never receive less than promised but could get more. Participants determine how much money they can afford to contribute each month, or set a lump sum. GE Life and Annuity will provide participants with an opportunity for higher monthly income based on investment performance.

The product will be available worldwide in May. According to GE, 30 financial companies have signed a 60-day exclusive agreement to sell the GE Retirement Answer.

Variable annuity from Penn Mutual

Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Horsham, Pa., has introduced PennFreedom, a variable annuity that offers a four-year surrender period and access to fixed-interest and variable subaccounts. Key features include:

* A four-year surrender schedule, which offers a contingent deferred sales charge surrender schedule. The duration is tied to the age of the contract, not the age of each purchase payment.

* One-, three-, five- and seven-year fixed interest rate options, designed to help protect the principal while earning an interest rate for a specified period.

* An unlimited number of free withdrawals up to 10% of the total purchase payment per contract year.

With an initial investment of $10,000, PennFreedom offers payment flexibility for additional contributions, subject to contract minimums.

In addition, beneficiaries are protected under PennFreedom’s standard death-benefit feature, which offers the greater of the variable-account value or net variable purchase payments adjusted for withdrawals or transfers. Three additional death-benefit riders are also available for an additional charge.

Also offered is an estate enhancement that increases the contract’s total face amount at death, providing additional funds to help offset any loss due to income taxation.

All of the benefits of PennFreedom are extended to the surviving spouse who is named the beneficiary. It allows the spouse to assume the contract, apart from the death-benefit riders, to avoid deferred sales charges.

Risk-managing tool offered to advisers

Efficient Portfolio LLC in Falls Church, Va., has launched Efficient Focus, an Internet service that helps advisers determine the level of risk acceptable to their clients and the mix of sectors that have given the highest returns at that level of risk.

Efficient Focus uses 16 questions to determine a client’s risk tolerance. After determining the mix of asset classes that have performed best, the tool then permits the adviser to identify the mutual funds that have performed best in each asset class.

Tool offered to help advisers use ETFs

Tamarac Inc. of Seattle, a provider of tax-efficient separate-account-management tools, has introduced exchange-traded funds into its system to enhance an adviser’s ability to build, manage and harvest tax losses.

Tamarac’s procedure analyzes both individual stocks and the underlying stocks of ETFs to determine the overall impact on a portfolio’s tracking error, tax cost, and security and sector weightings.

PPC to distribute aggregation tools

PPC, a Fort Worth, Texas, unit of Thomson Tax and Accounting, has partnered with Adhesion Technologies of Charlotte, N.C., a provider of aggregation tools to the financial services industry. PPC will offer Adhesion’s account aggregations software.

The software is a web-based platform designed to enable financial professionals to collaborate with their clients via the Internet. The product, EA2, will provide clients of certified public accountants and financial advisers with a picture of their balance sheet.

The software collects asset and liability information, including balances, transactions from credit cards, mortgages and consumer loans. The service is available to PPC subscribers for $249 a month per location plus $1.95 for each client.