An Uneasy Union
by Halah Touryalai and featured in Registered Rep November, 2009: When AIG was nearly wiped out last year in the mortgage crisis, Stan Bivin, an advisor at one of its independent broker/dealers, says he worried about what his clients would think. Some of his good friends, who were also top producers at AIG Financial Advisors — renamed SagePoint Financial in January — left the firm in the midst of AIG's fall from grace. But Bivin was determined to stay and deal with the uncertainty of his firm's future. “I'd been with the firm for over twenty years. I thought it was premature to bail and take clients and transition to another firm. We didn't feel our clients were being hurt,” he says. Now, a year after announcing its plans to sell...