Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. is encouraging brokers to sell more fee-based products during the current downturn according to a story in the Investment News.

MSDW is pushing its brokers to sell more fee-based accounts, and rely less on transactions by boosting the payout to 50% from 42%. The higher payouts are expected to last a year. “There’s a campaign encouraging this kind of business,” one veteran broker tells the Investment News. Another broker says that the firm has been hyping the new accounts over the company intranet.

MSDW is not alone in pushing brokers to sell more fee-based products in the United States. The paper says that Merrill Lynch told its brokers in the spring that it was thinking about raising the reward for selling more fee-based accounts.

The account that MSDW brokers are being asked to push charges annual fees to clients ranging from 0.3% to 2.25% of assets, with a minimum fee of US$1,000. The account minimum is US$50,000.