In the News

Open VA Platform at Ameriprise May Be Less Than Open

by Bruce Kelly and featured in Investment News
March, 2010:

Ameriprise Financial Inc.’s plan to open its brokerage platform to outside variable annuities falls short of the open architecture favored by other independent broker-dealers.

The move, which is expected to occur by the end of the second quarter, is apparently aimed in part at boosting Ameriprise’s ability to recruit independent-contractor registered representatives and financial advisers. Such advisers are often big sellers of variable annuities and consider the in-vestment options available to them carefully before changing firms.

But Ameriprise’s shift to openness comes with strings attached, which may curb an adviser’s desire to sell variable annuities from outside providers.

For example, the roughly 9,000 Ameriprise advisers affected by the plan won’t be allowed to contact wholesalers from such VA giants as Axa Equitable Life Insurance Co.,

Progessive, GunnAllen March to Altar

by Bruce kelly and featured in Investment News
January, 2010:

The big unknown surrounding Progressive Asset Management Inc.’s announcement last week that it is buying GunnAllen Financial Inc. is whether the socially conscious investment firm will acquire only GunnAllen’s 700 reps and their assets or the legal entity of the independent broker-dealer.

The fine points of the Progressive/GunnAllen marriage are important because the broker-dealer carries with it a history of legal disputes with customers stemming from the activities of Frank Blue-stein, a rogue broker who allegedly steered clients to a Ponzi scheme that went bust in 2007. GunnAllen also has had recent legal problems stemming from the blowup of private placements.

“We believe [the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc.] is closely watching the [merger] situation,” said Scott Silver,

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 its three independent b/ds,