PEOPLE: NEW NATIONSBANK FUNDS HONCHO; KNOWS GOAL AND HOW TO GET THERE

Stay the course. That’s the mantra of Robert H. Gordon, who recently took over the helm of NationsBank’s mutual fund business after his boss left for Denver to head Invesco Funds Group.

“It’s a job that essentially I’ve been training for, if you will,” says Mr. Gordon, who had been director of marketing and product development at NationsBanc Advisors Inc. under longtime Nations Funds chief Mark Williamson.

Mr. Gordon, 36, has spent most of his career working to establish NationsBank’s investment presence, initially in a consulting capacity with Lehman Brothers Institutional Funds Group and later as an employee of the bank.

found fidelity stultifying

In between, he spent a year as a product manager for Fidelity Investments, leaving after finding the mutual-fund giant set in its ways.

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and I wasn’t using mine,” he recalls.

Fidelity declined to comment on Mr. Gordon’s remarks.

Mr. Gordon helped steer NationsBank’s recent move to market its mutual funds outside the traditional bank and broker channels and

to reach out to fee-based financial planners.

Case in point: 18 months ago the Charlotte, N.C.-based holding company became one of the first banks to make its funds available on Charles Schwab & Co.’s OneSource fund supermarket, the leading fund trading platform for fee-based advisers.

Additionally, NationsBanc Advisors recently hired six wholesalers throughout the country to market the funds exclusively to registered investment advisers.

It’s an effort that hasn’t begun to pay off yet, Mr. Gordon allows. “The numbers are small at this point,” he says.

Nations Funds offers more than 50 portfolios representing a range of equity and fixed-income funds, as well as “enhanced” index funds that seek the benefits of passive management and add a measure of active management to try to beat the indexes.

The funds hold $32 billion, a total that will increase to $40 billion in coming weeks with the anticipated integration of the Emerald Funds belonging to Barnett Banks Inc. NationsBank bought Jacksonville, Fla.-based Barnett in January.

Indeed, NationsBank’s numerous bank acquisitions in recent years (it is now the country’s third-largest bank holding company), as well as conversions of clients’ trust accounts, have been responsible for much of the recent growth in mutual fund assets under management.

adviser push set

Another potent force for growth are the 700 brokers affiliated with NationsBanc Investments Inc., the bank’s broker-dealer unit.

But Mr. Gordon says he sees new momentum in the adviser sales effort and expects the contribution of assets from advisers

in future years to be in line with their overall share of the mutual-fund market.

Still, independent advisers

are a bigger challenge for bank-fund marketers than the brokerage houses on which they have concentrated in recent years, says Kenneth Kehrer, president of Kenneth Kehrer Associates Inc., a consulting firm based in Princeton, N.J.

Unlike brokerages and life insurance companies, which negotiate selling agreements with mutual fund complexes and have a centralized means of communicating with reps, fee-based advisers are disparate and far-flung.

“They’re organized more by onesies and twosies,” Mr. Kehrer says. “How do you get their attention?”

“There’s a lot of noise out there,” agrees Mr. Gordon.

“One of our biggest challenges is just getting out there and staying in front of the planners.”

But he has little doubt the banking giant will succeed.

“NationsBank has significant staying power,” he says, “and the ability to invest in businesses it believes in.”