Since 2014, the company has written off a significant value of those acquisitions, forcing it to seek bankruptcy protection.

The bankruptcy process proceeded rapidly after RCS Capital, or RCAP, filed for Chapter 11 restructuring in January.

Last week, a U.S. bankruptcy court in Delaware approved RCAP’s restructuring plan, allowing Cetera to emerge as an independent entity.

“The emergence was important for a number of reasons, the first being that we have work to do,” Roth says. “We have opportunities to service advisors and financial institutions in serving their clients in a new environment. We now have capital and leadership, so we’re in a great place. For a lot of reasons, we think the independent broker-dealer market is void of a true, clear leader. Moving forward, we’re going to help define what independent advice looks like.”

Simultaneously, the company announced that it is shuttering two of its broker dealers, VSR Group of Overland Park, Kan. and ICC Capital Corporation of Lynnfield, Mass., by consolidating them into other Cetera entities.

Last year, Cetera shut down another broker dealer, Atlanta-based J.P. Turner.

Yet the firm has managed to retain most of its advisor corps, said Pete Bush, CEO of Baton Rouge, La.-based Horizon Wealth Management, a Cetera-affiliated office of supervisory jurisdiction with over $1 billion AUM.

“Larry Roth and the senior leadership team of Cetera have persevered against extreme odds in successfully guiding Cetera through a very challenging restructuring process, with virtually no disruption to our day to day business operations or that of the advisors in our group,” said Bush in a statement released by Cetera on Wednesday. “The other top Cetera-affiliated advisors I am close with, like us, were both hopeful and confident this day would come and it has given us renewed confidence in Cetera and its leadership team.”

While Cetera has experienced some attrition from its 9,500-strong advisor workforce during RCS Capital’s bankruptcy, it remains the nation’s second-largest independent financial advisor network in the country by number of advisors.

Last month, Cetera celebrated the completion of its first recruitment since the bankruptcy filing with the addition of Albany, N.Y.-based hybrid Empire Asset Management Group.