Easy-to-use Morningstar mutual fund rating tool introduced

National Financial adds assessment and consulting services for broker-dealers
One way to keep broker-dealers happy — or at least above water — is to help them keep their costs down.
That’s the approach adopted by National Financial Services LLC, the clearing arm of Boston-based Fidelity Investments, which services more than 300 broker-dealer firms and manages $488 billion in assets.
The company has introduced Business Process Manager and Consulting Services, which assist the firm’s broker-dealer customers in improving the efficiency of both their brokerage and back-office operations.
National Financial dispatches teams of consultants to analyze the operations at a broker-dealer and to conduct in-depth assessments of a firm’s processes. It then creates a more efficient environment by improving electronic records management, imaging and work-flow automation.
The technology allows firms to capture, process and store data, such as account applications and transfer of assets forms. The imaging system is integrated with National Financial’s Streetscape brokerage workstation, developed to review, archive, index, search and audit records.
Fidelity processes more than 34 million work-flow transactions annually and stores more than 350 million online documents on the system, according to a statement.
The price for these services is determined by several factors.
“On the consulting side, it depends on how many people we are meeting with, how long [we’ll be] at the client’s site, and what they want us to cover in our analysis and benchmarking,” said Bobbi Masiello, senior vice president of new business development for National Financial.
For more information, visit National Financial online.

Easy-to-use Morningstar mutual fund rating tool now available
For those who seek an easy-to-understand way to analyze mutual funds, there is now a tool from Morningstar.com that, for the moment, is free.
Despite being somewhat buried amid the marketing for Russel Kinnel’s “Fund Spy: Morningstar’s Inside Secrets to Selecting Mutual Funds that Outperform” (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2009), the tool is still worth a look.
Follow the link and then click on the “Spy Selector” tab. A little rectangle appears asking you to insert a fund ticker. Do that, then hit the “Get Score” button to the right. That’s all there is to it.
Up will pop a gray rectangle with results including the fund’s overall Morningstar rating, expense ratio, risk rating, performance measure, fund return, benchmark return, manager range, manager rating, stewardship grade and six pass/fail grades.
Hover over any of these, and a full pop-up explanation will materialize.
Mr. Kinnel is the director of research for Morningstar Inc. of Chicago.