Hartford Offers Retirement Plan Program
The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. is launching a new business development program designed to help financial advisors better serve the businesses that sponsor retirement plans for their employees.

The new program features an online search engine available through www.hartfordinvestor.com that helps advisors find those businesses whose retirement savings plans could benefit from improvements. The engine features a directory with a unique preset query approach designed to save advisors time, help them build a pipeline of opportunities, improve their practice management and enable them to focus on the most common retirement program challenges in a more targeted fashion.

The directory, available through Larkspur, allows advisors to target businesses within specific industries, evaluate prospects within their own books of business, increase their access to professional practices and connect to business owners. The advisors will be able to employ a range of criteria in searching for information about retirement plan sponsors, including those with advanced retirement plan designs, professional firms and employers with retirement plan issues such as corrective distributions, expensive or restrictive plan designs, low participation rates and other things.

New Stock Valuation Platform Offered
OCE Interactive, based in New York City, is launching a Web-based platform for the benchmarking and valuation analysis of U.S. stocks. The new platform, Market Topographer, is designed to help investors and advisors navigate quickly changing markets.
Market Topographer will demonstrate how the market is rewarding and penalizing company valuations at any point in time and enable users to evaluate whether a stock is fairly priced. Additional information is available at www.markettopographer.com.

Evermore Launches New Global Funds
Evermore Global Advisors LLC, based in Summit, N.J., is launching Evermore Global Value Fund and Evermore European Value Fund. Both funds seek capital appreciation.

Evermore Global Value Fund will invest in worldwide securities, including the U.S. market, and Evermore European Value Fund will concentrate on European markets. The funds will look for investments in companies that are both undervalued and undergoing strategic changes, such as changes in management, restructurings, spin-offs and downsizings. Additional information is available at www.evermoreglobal.com.

Invesco Offers Closed-End ETFs
Invesco PowerShares, a provider of exchange-traded funds, is now offering PowerShares CEF Income Composite Portfolio. It is the first ETF designed to give investors access to a portfolio of closed-end funds. The fund will issue monthly distributions. It was expected to go ex-dividend in mid-March.
The new fund is designed to broaden the family of Invesco ETFs that provide income-based investment solutions. Additional information is available at www.invescopowershares.com/cef.

ING Offers Business Building Program
ING's U.S. Retirement Services business is now offering a new business-building program for advisors, consultants and third-party administrators serving the small and midsize corporate retirement plan market. The ING Grow Program is a suite of development tools designed to strengthen plan sponsor relationships.

Each tool is accompanied by an actionable sales idea the advisor can implement immediately. The new program also provides education resources and Web tools that advisors can use at employee meetings, seminars they can participate in and user-friendly retirement planning calculators.

Merger Provides Office Benefits
The Regus Group, a provider of flexible workplace solutions, and MarketCounsel, a provider of comprehensive business and regulatory consulting services to independent registered investment advisors, are creating an alliance to increase benefits for MarketCounsel clients.

MarketCounsel clients now will have unlimited access to Regus business lounges and cafes, preferred rates on ready-to-use day offices, discounts on Regus virtual offices and fully furnished offices and other benefits to make it easier for advisors to open and operate their own businesses. Additional information is available at www.regus.com.