Columbia Mngt helps advisors improve retirement offerings. Columbia Management has come up with a new “value add” for the advisors it wants to impress. The asset-management arm of Bank of America has linked up with the Retirement Learning Center, a Brainerd, Minn.-based firm that helps businesses understand their retirement-plan options, to form something called the Columbia Management Retirement Center.

“Retirement planning is a complex part of an investor's complete financial profile,” says Donald Froude, Columbia’s head of intermediary distribution. “Through [the “center”] we can give our partners useful and up-to-date information and materials so they can help provide strategies for their clients.”

By “partners” Froude means the advisors his wholesalers are targeting. The “center” is meant to be “a multi-dimensional, ready” resource to help advisors increase their knowledge and productivity in the retirement-plan and rollover marketplace, according to a press release from Columbia Management.

Among the subjects covered by the Retirement Learning Center experts are individual retirement-plan consolidations, lump-sum distributions from defined benefit plans, net unrealized appreciation, in-service transfers, 403(b) plan transfers, 457 government plan rollovers, wealth harvesting and income strategies.

Boston-based Columbia Management had $361.1 billion in assets under management on 31 December 2005. –FWR

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