Wealth management

RBC Wealth Management is folding its Northwest region into the West, Midwest and South regions, effectively cutting its number of private client regions in the United States to six from seven.

Citi Personal Wealth Management is shifting its investment advisory model to a fee-only service and plans to work with registered investment advisers in an effort to broaden its geographic coverage, the company announced today.

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American Century Investments has launched a collective investment trust program. Also known as commingled or collective funds, collective investment trusts are tax-exempt, pooled investment vehicles designed exclusively for qualified plans, including 401(k) plans, as well as for certain types of government plans.

It was easy to embrace managed futures after 2008, when as a class they showed a 20% gain while markets lost nearly 40%. They are one of the only investments that did well last year, in part because they are not correlated with stocks and bonds.

Despite their sinister-sounding name, dark pools of liquidity can be very beneficial to average investors by offering mutual funds and large institutional investors an efficient way to make large trades without impacting the market.

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Provident Financial Services Inc. has hired Alan D. Segars as vice president and investment management officer of its wealth management group.

Vanguard Group has named F. Joseph Loughrey to its board of directors and to the board of trustees of each of the Valley Forge, Pa., investment company's mutual funds.

Northern Trust Corp. announced that it has promoted Patrick Everett to Dallas regional president.

Touchstone Investments of Cincinnati announced that it has introduced 10 mutual funds.

Grail Advisors of San Francisco has launched four actively managed exchange-traded funds.

A small Boston advisory firm is poised to expand from New England to the Middle Atlantic states and beyond because its executives believe the richest Americans want alternatives to the money-center banks.

Bear Stearns Asset Management Inc., now part of JPMorgan Chase & Co., and two former Bear Stearns fund managers must defend some claims by Bank of America Corp. in a lawsuit over the collapse of two Bear Stearns funds in 2007, a federal judge has ruled.

Citizens Financial Group Inc., the Providence, R.I., arm of Royal Bank of Scotland Group, says it will aggressively expand its wealth management businesses as some competitors contract.

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For Paul Stetter, an adviser at Fulton Financial Corp. in Lancaster, Pa., moving to a fee-based advisory business was a no-brainer. The 38-year-old adviser "didn't want to wind up at 55 working the same way I've been working for the past four years," starting from zero each month.

In a move to expand its U.S. investment adviser and wealth management operations, Royal Bank of Canada said Tuesday it has agreed to buy JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s third-party registered investment adviser service business; the price was not disclosed.

UBS AG has announced the appointments of Jimmy Neissa and John Wall as global co-heads of investment banking, alongside Rick Leaman.

Credit Suisse Group AG says it may expand its lineup of exchange-traded funds to include commodities such as precious metals.