John Hancock Funds [see profile] will soon have wholesalers dedicated to the bank and Edward Jones channels. Keith Hartstein, president and CEO at John Hancock Funds, made the revelation during a panel on Tuesday afternoon at the MFwire Influencers Summit in Boston.

Starting next month, Hancock Funds will have 10 external wholesalers devoted to the bank channel and another 10 dedicated to the Edward Jones channel. All 20 wholesalers are joining Hancock Funds from the annuity side of John Hancock. They will be selling annuities, mutual funds and 529s.

Hancock is also building a common inside sales support desk that will consist of seven people for each of those two channels. "We didn't want a wholesaler in the field to call two different people, one for annuities and one for mutual funds," Hartstein explained in an interview.

The annuity business is a "constrained growth business at John Hancock," Hartstein said. "We want to have a certain amount of sales, but we don't want to have a ton of sales in annuities. The product design has been structured to bring in a certain level of sales."

"The annuity unit already has a dedicated bank channel and a decidated Edward Jones channel. It just made sense that we would leverage those two channels on the mutal fund side," he said.

With the 20 externals moving to Hancock Funds, the insurer's fund unit will have a total of 80 externals, 60 of whom exclusively focus on selling mutual funds. 

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