Eaton Vance, Putnam Investments, OppenheimerFunds, GE Asset Management, and The Hartford Financial Services Group are among the fund firms that have eliminated NAV transfers recently, reported InvestmentNews.

Conversations with the companies that have ended NAV transfers point to the fund firms' desire to achieve parity.

"The Hartford, along with the rest of the industry, wants to ensure that transactions are appropriately priced...[g]iven the increasing challenges that broker-dealers were facing in tracking and monitoring this NAV pricing, we elected to discontinue the NAV transfer option," the company told InvestmentNews in a written statement.

The motivation over at GE Asset Management was also along those lines: "We did it to ensure we are on an equal playing field with respect to what others are doing in the industry," the article reported Tim Benedict, the company's spokesman, as saying.

"Everything is evolving in the industry as it relates to pricing; broker pricing is evolving," Gordon Forrester, director of marketing at Putnam, was reported as saying.

The NASD fined AXA Financial $250,000 in April for failing to waive sales charges for customers swapping funds, despite the fact that the firm had NAV transfer programs in place. 

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