Sometimes waiving your loads just isn't enough.

Tom Stringfellow Frost Investment Advisors President, Managing Director, Chief Investment Officer, Fund Manager

Frost Investment Advisors [profile], a $3.5-billion mutual fund shop and subsidiary of the Texas-based bank, has historically had two share classes: retail shares (basically A shares) with 12b-1 fees and front-end loads, and institutional shares with neither 12b-1s nor loads. Advisors have been able to get the load waive. Yet Tom Stringfellow, president and chief investment officer of the fund firm, says that advisors had been telling his team that Frost's funds were too expensive. So this spring he made a change.

"We closed the retail shares, renamed them as advisor shares, did away with the loads," Stringfellow tells MFWire. "The interest spiked."

The advisor shares have the 12b-1 fee but not the load, so for an advisor they're the same as getting the old retail shares load-waived. Yet the switch, Stringfellow says, is opening them up to "a lot of platforms where it was more difficult to get on because of the retail nature of the shares."

"Avenues opened up," Stringfellow says. 

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