It also markets third-party mutual funds through banks, which are precluded by bank regulations from using their own employees to sell mutual funds and insurance.

Several firms are marketing multibillion-dollar funds, and pension fund officials are complaining that they do not have enough money to invest as much as they would like in all of the portfolios.

Besides its pension advisory work, it markets mutual funds, private investment advisory services and institutional brokerage services, in the United States and in 25 countries abroad.

In March, for example, it announced that it had joined with Societe Generale in Paris to market mutual funds to its European customers.

Mercury said it would maintain its representative office in Zurich through which it markets mutual funds and other investment services.

"Distribution will be to the 1990's what performance was to the 1980's," said Richard Stierwalt, chief executive of Concord Financial Group, which markets bank-affiliated mutual funds.

G.E.'s finance unit agreed to buy Weyerhaeuser's GNA unit, which markets mutual funds and insurance products.

In Maine, regulators joined counterparts from several other states to bring a lawsuit against First Investors Corporation, which had marketed high-yield funds to local residents, many of them elderly.

The rush to sue goes beyond mutual fund companies that marketed "safe" short-term funds without emphasizing that those funds owned volatile securities, although several such big cases exist.

Some investment houses have gone further and actively marketed cash-based roll-up funds.