BMO Mutual Funds has captured DALBAR’s 2006 Mutual Fund Service Award, given to the Canadian mutual fund company that provides the best overall service to its investors over the calendar year.

This marks the first year that BMO has won the award, after several years of the company placing very highly in DALBAR’s annual rankings.

Other top-quartile finishers in 2006 were Franklin Templeton Investments, AIC Limited, and AIM Trimark Investments.

“The folks at BMO have made service a top priority for many years now, and it gives us great pleasure to be able to recognize them with this distinction,” said Mark McDonald, DALBAR’s manager of client relations.

DALBAR also announced that BMO has won the Mutual Fund Service Award for service to French-speaking investors, marking the first time since 2002 that a company has provided industry-leading service to clients in both languages.

Other top-quartile companies in French-language service were Scotia Securities and Franklin Templeton Investments.

The awards are given to the companies which place first in DALBAR’s year-end rankings, which are based on evaluations made over a calendar year in four categories: quality of telephone service representatives, effectiveness of e-mail communication, telephone wait times, and e-mail response times.

By playing the role of the investor in over 2,000 telephone calls and over 400 e-mails throughout the year, DALBAR actively experiences the service that the average Canadian mutual fund investor would receive from each company.

DALBAR, Inc. is a financial services research firm with offices in Toronto and Boston, specializing in measuring the performance of institutions and financial professionals in areas such as service quality, customer satisfaction, and communications effectiveness.