Briefly:

(October 3, 2007) On Wednesday, Altamira introduced two new products to its Meritage Portfolio lineup — the International Equity Portfolio and the American Equity Portfolio.

The new offerings are composed of 100% equities and are supposed to achieve long-term capital growth by investing mostly in U.S. or international equity funds.

Investors will need a minimum of $5,000 to invest in these portfolios, but, according to the company, they’ll get “competitive management expense ratios.”

Winfund integrated with PlanPlus

(October 3, 2007) Winfund has announced that it has fully integrated PlanPlus Web Advisor with its recently released version of W.Connect, “a state-of-the-art browser-based mutual fund dealer back office administration, reporting and portfolio management system used by dealers and their advisors.”

In the past, advisors using W.Connect and PlanPlus had to type financial information in twice, but now they can select a client plan in W.Connect, launch PlanPlus, and data will be automatically updated.

“In the past few years we have seen continuing loss of market share for new fund sales by independent advisors to the banks,” says Shawn Brayman, president of PlanPlus. “The need to raise the bar by providing planning advice has never been stronger. By integrating to Winfund’s W.Connect, which is used by thousands of independent advisors, we will allow an advisor to do more robust planning in a fraction of the time by avoiding unnecessary re-keying of data.”

With the two platforms now integrated, the company thinks its products will be more appealing to firms that want to provide advisors with state-of-the-art back-office systems.

(10/03/07)

Staff

The staff of Advisor.ca have been covering news for financial advisors since 1998.