Wealth management

Fidelity Investments promoted Abigail Johnson to president of personal, workplace and institutional services — effectively in charge of all distribution channels — and hired BNY Asset Management President and Chief Executive Ronald P. O'Hanley to head asset management and corporate services.

T. Rowe Price is gaining new market share as banks and other intermediaries move to a fees-and-advice model, and as the mutual fund company makes a concentrated push overseas to rebuild its assets under management.

Citigroup Inc. plans to hire more than 100 financial advisers over the next three years for its personal wealth management group, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Repricings have been a fact of life in the bank loan market for a while, but while there's little doubt that they can be good news for the issuer, they are beginning to irk investors, who are tiring of seeing coupons slashed by more than a third, Libor floors sliced in half and pricing grids being added to deals.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association is in discussions with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to establish the first training, licensing and continuing education program for operations executives at financial firms.

Amid stock market gyrations, stagnant employment numbers and uncertainty about interest rates, a significant majority of online investors polled by the Web-based brokerage TradeKing are still counting on the U.S. to lend horsepower to a global economic recovery.

New rules and technology, trends among baby boomers and the Great Recession have led to a burst in Roth individual retirement account conversions.

Ryan Specialty Group, a start-up insurance brokerage founded by the former chief executive of Aon Corp., has recruited about 100 employees from an insurance unit of BB&T Corp., according to people familiar with the matter.

In retirement, employees will need 15.7 times their final pay when factoring in inflation and postretirement medical costs, according to a study by Hewitt Associates.

Investment managers rely on an array of electronic tools to execute the most complex program trading and algorithmic trading strategies. And brokerage firms and banks can pretty much communicate with their institutional clients electronically in a matter of minutes if not seconds or even microseconds.

Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday mulled whether investment bankers should be subject to additional criminal liability, including jail time, for misguiding customers on investment decisions.

To attract more assets, kaChing, an online provider that connects investment managers with investors, has launched a platform for small and midsize registered investment advisers.

Keeping up with its competitors, Vanguard Group announced Tuesday that it has reduced commissions associated with its exchange-traded funds and stock trades.

Banks' fixed annuity sales fell 16% in the fourth quarter from the previous quarter and 43% year over year, according to Beacon Research's Fixed Annuity Premium Study. That followed a 13% drop from the second to the third quarter.

An arbitration panel has ordered a former Wells Fargo Advisors LLC broker to repay the company a signing bonus of nearly $1.3 million.

Bank of America Corp.'s U.S. Trust unit is embarking on a new advertising campaign aimed at ultra-high-net-worth investors.

RBC Capital Markets, which aggressively expanded its staff over the past 12 months, has moved beyond its traditional middle-market client base and is chasing large-cap companies.

Takefuji Corp. sued Merrill Lynch Japan Securities Co. for about $309 million over losses on a 2007 bond deal designed to reduce the consumer lender's interest costs.

About 70% of working people have given up on the idea of retirement, according to the 2010 Employee Benefits Research Institute Retirement Confidence Survey, up from 63% in 2008.

Overall sales of annuities though bank holding companies were up slightly at $2.62 billion in 2009, according to the latest Michael White-American Bankers Insurance Association Bank Annuity Fee Income Report.