NEW: iPipeline, Tim Wallace's Exton-based insurance-sales software maker, will announce Friday it's raised $15 million from Mike DiPiano's New Spring Capital, of Radnor, and Fidelity Ventures, of Boston, to fund acquisitions.

EARLIER: iPipeline says it's buying Utah-based AgencyWorks, a life-insurance agency software firm. The firms won't say what iPipeline is paying.

In a statement, Wallace said the firms' products are complementary and would "create the largest insurance network in the industry" for clients including John Hancock, Metlife, Nationwide and other national firms.

iPipeline employs 68 in Exton, and about 32 more in Milwaukee, Atlanta, Hartford, Charlotte and Los Angeles. AgencyWorks employs around 40 in Utah, who will keep their jobs under President Andrea Evans.

"We are hiring approximately 20 individuals" due to "organic growth over the next couple of months," and hope to hire more than 20 next year, iPipeline spokesman Mike Persiano told me.

CardioNet Inc., the Conshohocken maker of electronic heart monitors, was one of the few bright spots in corporate Philadelphia last year as it continued hiring salespeople while others laid off. But then, big insurers began reducing the prices they were willing to reimburse users.

Last week, CardioNet reported a 47% jump in third-quarter patient volume over last year. But profit margins fell 3.4% "due to lower reimbursement rates from both Medicare and commercial payers," and CardioNet lost money on higher sales, after profiting in the same quarter last year, reports Boenning & Scattergood analyst Greg Chodaczek.

"While we still believe CardioNet is the technology leader in the cardiovascular monitoring space, CardioNet must drastically alter its expense structure in order for its business to stay viable," Chodaczek concluded.

In a statement to shareholders Friday, ceo Randy Thurman told CardioNet investors that the company faces two problems: lower-than-expected reimbursement of only $754 per monitor by Pittsburgh-based insurer Highmark Medical Services, and lower-than-expected bill collection due partly to "billing and collection practices stemming from the Company's entrepreneurial past which have taken longer than expected to correct." 

"Without significant restructuring," CardioNet is "in jeopardy," he added. But it's addressing the problems, and "CardioNet's strong cash position adn lack of debt provides us with time to effect these changes." More later, he promised.

The Federal Reserve system was set up in 1913 to cushion the economy from the booms and busts that used to wreck banks, depositors and borrowers every 10 or 20 years. Since then, we've had one big economic bust about every 50 years. Is that progress? Time to start over?

The Fed includes 12 regional banks, one in Philadelphia, whose boards are made up of local businessmen and bankers and the occasional labor leader (Philadelphia's new Fed chairman is Tastykake ceo Charles Pizzi).

But the Fed's clearest power resides in the New York regional Fed, which oversees the Wall Street banks, and especially in the Washington-based office of the Fed's Chairman, currently Ben Bernanke, who's appointed by the President, and ratified by the Senate.

The Fed only regulates some banks. Others are monitored by examiners from the Treasury Department's Office of the Controller of the Currency (national banks), or its Office of Thrift Supervision (savings banks), or the independent Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (which also runs the banks' deposit insurance fund), or state regulators.

The Fed's independence from Congress is supposed to enable its chairmen and their boards to stand up to politicians who are tempted to overheat the economy. For example, Paul Volcker kept interest rates high, and helped defeat Jimmy Carter in 1980, bringing in Ronald Reagan, because Volcker, even though he was a Democrat like Carter, believed he had to keep rates high to stop inflation.

But later Fed chairman Alan Greenspan believed in cheap money and limited regulation; he thought markets fixed themselves, and asset bubbles couldn't be regulated away. Timothy Geithner, as New York Fed head during the subprime loan inflation years, seemed to go along with that too. 

And then the banks blew up, wrecking the economy. So now Congress wants to fix things. Writes Blank Rome's Financial Reform Watch:

»  More Do banks need One Big Regulator?

One of the casualties of the Pfizer-Wyeth merger is Pfizer's research center in downtown New London, Conn., set for closure. Seems a waste: 

Not only did Pfizer spend millions building the place; government officials also invested heavily in forcing reluctant residents to sell their waterfront properties. The city fought a case to establish government's right to "eminent domain" property seizures all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the community value of having Pfizer downtown outweighed private property rights. They won, but now they didn't; and it's all so expensive.

Pharmalot.com lays out the struggle here, citing news accounts from the New London Day, Hartford Courant and Wall St. Journal (via Villanova University).

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Traiman Real Estate Auction Co., Philadelphia, plans to auction a 130,000 square foot factory on 2.3 acres, right in front of the planned Sugar House Casino slots parlor, in the 1000 block of Frankford Ave., on Dec. 4. It's zoned C-3, which typically works for retail or residential, Traiman president Doug Clemens tells me.

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Stantec, an Edmonton, Canada firm that's been rolling up U.S. business consultants during the recession, has acquired Granary Associates, a Philadelphia project-management and hospital-design firm with around 120 workers, including 75 at its 20th and Callowhill  headquarters, the rest in New York and Qatar. The firms wouldn't say what Stantec paid.

"There's a lot of consolidation going on," Stantec chief financial officer Rich Allen told me. His company claimed $1.3 billion (US) in sales last year, and higher sales so far this year, but all the gain was from acquisitions, not internal growth, which slowed. Granary sales totalled around $30.5 million.

Granary was started in 1979 as a group within the former Mediq Inc., and had been independent since 1995. Granary has counted the University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson hospital systems in Philadelphia, Sloan Kettering and St. Vincent's in New York, and Robert Wood Johnson in New Jersey among its clients, plus hospitals across Pennsylvania and in Tennessee.

"They're adding to our healthcare business," which includes a San Francisco-based architecture office, Allen said. "There's not a lot of overlap. The plan is to integrate all" Granary employees.

»  More Canada firm buys Philly's Granary, hospital designers

"We want to get our arms around gigantic mega-corporations that have more power than some nations," says U.S. Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., a House leader who says he's drafting a bill to break up big companies, so we aren't asked to save the likes of AIG, Chrysler and Citigroup again, in the PhillyDeals column in today's Inquirer here.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK: Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein says his firm's not too big to fail. "It’s far, far simpler than most of the competitors," he told a conference today, writes Bloomberg's Christine Harper here.

Stockbrokers are leaving big national firms and going into business for themselves. James Wiley of Wiley Group, formerly part of Morgan Stanley's West Conshohocken office, made the move with seven associates last month, forming Wiley Group. It's gotten easier to outsource. More in last Sunday's PhillyDeals column here. Highlights:

- Charles Schwab Corp., whose retail business suffered in last year's crash, is expanding as a cash custodian for independent advisers, says  Thomas Intoccia, a managing director at Schwab's Radnor office.

- Instead of relying on a parent company's Web site and account services, "we can have our own Web site, and fill it with our own [investment research] papers, and we can offer day-to-day online performance reporting and quarterly reports," Wiley told me.

- Instead of doing all its own compliance, Wiley relies on the Princeton-based securities division of the New Jersey law firm Stark & Stark, which has made a business of serving independent advisers.

- Instead of developing its own products, as Morgan Stanley and other big firms do, Wiley sells exchange-traded funds, which are basically index mutual funds that trade like stocks and can be bought and sold with minimum hassle. "We use Vanguard, Barclays, State Street, a lot of Wisdom Tree," Wiley said. ETFs have helped keep Vanguard afloat, says Philadelphia mutual fund consultant Burt Greenwalt.

Robert Costello, head of Costello Asset Management, Huntington Valley, said he moved his $35 million-asset business out of Boenning & Scattergood Inc. last year. He doesn't buy funds for his clients: he's an old-fashioned stock-picker, which he says delivers better value and costs customers less in fees.

»  More Brokers quit Wall Street firms to go it alone

Just four years into a 15-year lease, shrinking Sunoco has asked Philadelphia office broker David Binswanger to find new tenants for its headquarters in the Mellon Bank Center, 1735 Market Street.

NEW: Is Sunoco getting ready to leave its Center City space? "We are exploring a number of opportunities to consolidate our office space and reduce our costs," responds spokesman Thomas Golembeski in an e-mail.

EARLIER: The oil refiner and retailer and chemical maker has been laying off workers at the 221,000-square-foot headquarters as it closes and sells operations in the field. Sunoco has sold its home fuel-truck network, cut retiree benefits, and is shutting and selling Philadelphia-area plants, with guidance from cost-cutters at McKinsey & Co.

By contrast, Sunoco is expanding its coke (steel-mill fuel) operations in the Midwest, and looking for a possible "partner" for the modernization of its Toledo, Ohio, refinery, chief executive Lynn L. Elsenhans told analysts in a conference call Nov. 5.

»  More For Rent: Sunoco headquarters