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.