Product Watch: New Thomson website targets advisers’ clients

Thomson Financial Solutions in Rockville, Md., has unveiled a new flagship brand, ThomsonFN, which can be found at thomsonfn.com. The free website extends to investors the value of Thomson Financial’s analysis tools and market financial content. The company will also offer those tools and content – as well as providing application and consulting services – to its core institutional clients via licensing and syndication agreements.

Thomson Financial’s portfolio of services is designed to help advisers attract and retain individual investor clients. ThomsonFN’s analytical tools include:

* Market Movers, which delivers a series of interactive charts that allow users to put individual stock and industry performance into perspective throughout the trading day.

* Seasonality Tracker, which offers investors a visual alert on what have historically been a stock’s best- and worst-performing months.

* I-Watch, which gives individual investors access to a “bulletin board” on which institutional broker-dealers can express their interest in buying and selling shares at specific prices. The “board” signals where the “big money” is lining up before a stock begins to move.

* Insider Interpreter Database, which contains detailed insider-transaction histories and nightly updates for 14,000 public companies, plus a unique empirical process that measures the trading skills of more than 120,000 corporate executives.

* Insider Snapshot, which features graphical tools that allow users to easily spot insider-trading trends and anomalies for a given company or industry, or the broader market.

* Options Watch, which visually alerts investors to options and informs them which contract months and specific strike prices are attracting the most activity for a given security.

Compliance tool

for variable products

* NewRiver Inc. in Andover, Mass., is offering VP-Express, which is a compliance data management and analysis tool for variable products. By using XML (extensible markup language), VP-Express enables the tagging of significant content elements within every variable product disclosure document filed on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Edgar database – including all subaccount prospectuses.

That simplifies compliance data management, because VP-Express provides a comprehensive warehouse of variable-contract disclosure documents for regulated electronic delivery to investors, as well as an accompanying database of compliance content that can be mined by issuers for competitive research, product design and online marketing applications.

Long-term-care

feature from Hancock

* John Hancock Life Insurance Co. in Boston has introduced Revolution FX, a modified guaranteed annuity with long-term-care options. The fixed annuity provides competitive rates, plus an optional long-term-care feature called CareSolutions. The CareSolutions benefit, available for 0.10% of the contract value annually, offers referral services and provider discounts for elderly care. It also allows the annuity owner or spouse – even if not party to the contract – to trigger the nursing home/critical illness waiver of surrender charges.

With Revolution FX, individuals can combat market uncertainty by locking in guaranteed interest rates. The product fulfills clients’ multiple protection and investment needs while helping them begin planning for long-term care.

Revolution FX offers fixed rates that are guaranteed for periods of one to 10 years. Consumers can select a specific guarantee period or can diversify durations, depending on their financial needs. Individuals will receive the guaranteed interest rate as long as the money stays in the contract for the duration of the guarantee period.

Revolution FX can be sold through broker-dealers, financial planners, banks and Hancock’s Signator career agency network.