If all goes as planned, more than 5,200 advisors under the old AIG Advisor Group umbrella will find themselves working under new ownership later this year with little or no disruption to their business. And the hope is that they may now benefit from working for a more concentrated parent company.

Private equity firm Lightyear Capital announced on Tuesday that it would acquire the broker-dealer network from global insurance firm American International Group and install former Cetera CEO Valerie Brown as executive chairman. Questions were immediately raised about the future direction of the company and its four subsidiary broker-dealers—FSC Securities Corp., Royal Alliance Associates, SagePoint Financial and Woodbury Financial Services.

“The four broker-dealers will remain the same,” says Advisor Group CEO Erica McGinnis, who will stay on after the acquisition and work in partnership with Brown. “Lightyear is purchasing the Advisor Group in an ‘as-is’ format.”

Brown’s newly formed executive chairman position will not alter McGinnis’ day-to-day control of the company.

“I’m joining the management team full time,” says Brown. “My role will be the governance you’d expect from any board chairman. I’m partnering with Erica to develop strategy and work with our board to identify the best places to allocate capital going forward.”

Brown says she will also spearhead some of the firm’s lobbying and advocacy efforts. “I will also focus externally on opportunities to grow and to represent this industry. I have a lot of passion for this industry, and I will play a role in advocacy with trade organizations as we continue to serve clients moving forward.”

The Advisor Group will attempt to retain its structure, advisors and assets after the acquisition closes in the second quarter of 2016.

“Myself and the Lightyear folks, we’re very familiar with networks like the Advisor Group,” Brown says. “We respect the individual culture of the broker-dealers and the independent nature of the advisors.”

Donald Marron, Lightyear’s chairman, confirms that retention deals may be offered to the independent advisors to keep the firm intact.

“The advisors won’t see a change, and their clients won’t see a change,” Marron says.

These firms and executives are familiar names after playing leadership musical chairs following the financial crisis: Lightyear bought broker-dealer network Cetera in 2010 and appointed Brown as its CEO. Then, in 2013, McGinnis was appointed CEO of the Advisor Group to replace Larry Roth, who would go on to replace Brown at Cetera after it was sold to RCS Capital in 2014. Lightyear had already once negotiated with AIG to purchase the Advisor Group in 2009, but the deal fell through after former AIG CEO Robert Benmosche scuttled it during final negotiations.

At the end of 2014, the Advisor Group managed $160 billion in client assets, earning around $1.3 billion in revenues for the year. The network had more than 5,200 advisors and an additional 800 full-time employees when the Lightyear deal was announced.

“It will just get better from here,” McGinnis says.

Outgoing owner AIG is undergoing significant restructuring as it sells, scuttles, streamlines and spins off its multiple diverse business units in response to criticism from investors, including Carl Icahn, that it has become too big to manage. AIG’s broad focus may have meant that, at times, the Advisor Group wanted for attention from its parent company—a problem that won’t occur at Lightyear, Marron says.

Marron says: “AIG was a great parent, but it had a lot of children. The Advisor Group is going to be a direct focus of ours.”

Marron, who previously ran the PaineWebber Group, says that Lightyear’s experience in the financial services space and its resources will help the Advisor Group adapt to the changing regulatory environment.

“We bought this company because we like this business,” Marron says. “We want to build around advisory activities focused on people with 401(k)s and IRAs who need money for retirement. There are roughly 70 million Americans with retirement accounts who need advice, and that’s where we see opportunity.”

That includes preparing for the anticipated adoption of the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule.

“Independence is key for us,” Brown says. “We avoid potential conflicts of interest as a stand-alone firm”—because the advisors will no longer be bound to selling AIG products. “The shelf for new products will be open, but we will do a lot of due diligence on that shelf.”

In previous comments to the media, AIG CEO Peter Hancock has cited the pending fiduciary rule as one reason for the sale.

“This industry is dynamic,” Brown says. “There will always be changes and opportunities and challenges. We will respond to the regulatory environment and adjust products as necessary to the changes.”

Brown, the former Cetera CEO, noted the benefits of being under Lightyear’s umbrella.

“We found that given their long history with service firms and with high-net-worth clients, they were able to bring connections to us and help us to bring more innovative products into the industry,” Brown says. “They bring leadership and thought processes that we found very helpful.”

Marron also hopes to improve the advisors’ access to technology—previously, the Advisor Group had estimated that technology costs for implementing the fiduciary rule alone would “run somewhere around $5 million.”

“We understand this business, and we understood it before we got involved with Cetera,” Marron says. “We will proceed to try to enhance the technology available to our advisors and to improve the quality of our products.”

Lightyear will continue to explore acquisition candidates.

“At the moment, our total goal is to effect the transition from AIG,” Marron says. “We will absolutely do recruiting and acquisitions, but that’s in the future.”