In the News

An Uneasy Union

00:00 01 November in In the News by rafferty

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...

Ease of shift from Pershing platform surprises reps who stayed with LPL

00:00 01 October in In the News by rafferty

by Darla Mercado and featured in Investment News October, 2009: Advisers once annoyed by LPL Financial's decision to move brokers from three acquired firms off Pershing LLC's clearing platform say they're pleasantly surprised by how the independent broker-dealer has eased their transition. Close to a month after LPL shifted some 1,700 advisers affiliated with Mutual Service Corp., Associated Securities Corp. and Waterstone Financial Group over to LPL's own clearing platform, advisers who remained through the transition are saying the change really hasn't been all that bad. “The technology is faster and more efficient, and now I can contact people directly at LPL, whereas before, I had to go through Mutual Service Corp. and then to Pershing,” said William Hamm, president of Independent Financial Partners. “You never talked to the horse's mouth.” However, the platform change...

AIG Advisor Group: They’re Back

00:00 01 October in In the News by rafferty

by Paul Menchaca and featured in Financial Planning October, 2009: It is late afternoon on the last day of August, and Larry Roth sits in a beige and ivory conference room on the 15th floor of One World Financial Center in Manhattan. The setting sun is beaming through a large window behind him. Most of the office has emptied out for the day. Roth, the CEO of AIG Advisor Group, is considering the question at hand: After relentless bad publicity for a massive government bailout to rescue a company rendered nearly insolvent by the reckless deal making of a small unit in London, wouldn't it have been easier to have made a clean break from the troubled parent company? I don't think that's true at all," Roth says. He gives several compelling reasons...