Wealth management

Sun Life Financial Inc.'s U.S. division has promoted Michael E. Shunney to president of Sun Life Financial Distributors Inc., its wholesale annuity distribution arm.

Everything from prudent planning to a little bit of luck helped community bank wealth management departments hold up in the tough market conditions last year, but some say they could have a harder time this year.

Putnam Investments said it had hired Carroll Shipman to be a senior vice president of regional 401(k) sales.

BMO Capital Markets, the investment and corporate banking arm of Toronto's Bank of Montreal, has signed a definitive agreement to buy Griffin, Kubik, Stephens & Thompson Inc. in Chicago.

Vanguard Group, a Valley Forge, Pa., fund company, has announced the introduction of three managed payout funds.

Jackson National Life Insurance Co., a Lansing, Mich., subsidiary of London's Prudential PLC, has announced that it generated $3.5 billion of sales and deposits, including $2.7 billion of retail sales and deposits, in the first quarter.

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The French bank BNP Paribas SA is in advanced talks to buy the equities prime brokerage unit of Bank of America Corp., the Financial Times reports online Monday, citing unnamed sources, in a move that would boost the French bank's U.S. presence and let the Charlotte company scale down its investment banking business.

Third in a series

Wilmington Trust Corp. posted a 3.7% drop in first-quarter net income from a year earlier, to $41.4 million, as a result of surging credit costs and lower interest rates.

Bank of America Corp. hired Claire Huang as the head of marketing for its global wealth and investment management division.

Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. posted its third quarterly loss in a row Thursday and said it would cut another 4,000 jobs, as damage from a poorly managed plunge into risky credit market activities under its previous chief executive continued to hurt U.S. brokers.

After Bank of New York Mellon Corp. posted its second consecutive quarter of writedowns related to subprime mortgage investments, its top executive said the company wants to take a “laser focus” on its asset management and servicing businesses and plans to continue pruning units that fall outside those circles.

Over 90% of more than 300 senior hedge fund managers in a survey have said that they expect the $1.8 trillion hedge fund industry to attract "significant" new money this year, according to Rothstein Kass, an accounting firm that sponsored the survey.

For more information on this data, visit Novantas LLC and Market Rates Insight.

Households with a net worth of $1 million to $5 million display a much humbler way of life than the term "millionaire" tends to evoke, according to a report by Chicago's Spectrem Group.

SEI Investments, an Oaks, Pa., investment manager, has announced that its private banking unit introduced an enhanced integrated managed account platform to U.S. banks.

New York Life International LLC, a unit of New York Life Insurance Co., has named Anthony Mak the president and chief executive officer of its wholly owned Hong Kong subsidiary, New York Life Insurance Worldwide Ltd.