“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.”