How Fiduciary Rule Will Change Advisor Business: AIG Advisor Group Panel

A panel of experts urged advisors affiliated with the AIG Advisor Group to read up and speak up on the Department of Labor’s proposed fiduciary rule, despite the fact that the official regulatory comment period is over.

“No one disputes the intentions, but they do [dispute] the details,” said Dale Brown, president and CEO of the Financial Services Institute, speaking before 2,000 advisors and 1,000 other guests at the AIG Advisor Group’s ConnectED conference on Tuesday in San Antonio.

Brown described advisors’ and broker-dealers’ main complaint about the proposed rule: It is based on the premise that there should be no conflicts of interest versus the view of some securities professionals that such conflicts can be “successfully managed.”

AIG Advisor Group President and CEO Erica McGinnis asked Brown to highlight the timeline of the proposal: “Is it moving at a lightning pace?”

“We are waiting to see the final proposal, which we expect to see … in the spring of next year, and we know we will see it before January 2017, when President Obama leaves office,” the FSI CEO explained.  

The wider AIG organization, which has some 30,000 employees, “has been reaching out to Congress and has sent 11,000 messages to the DOL” about the proposal, according to Richard Loconte, deputy head and associate general counsel of federal government affairs for AIG.

“AIG shares the administration’s goal of working in the best interests of the client,” Loconte explained. “But we see the ambiguous and uncertain [aspects] of the proposal and the problematic environment it creates for advisors, who could not provide products and services, such as those tied to lifetime income, that clients need.”

Possible Consequences

Several members of the panel addressed the practicalities of the expected regulatory shift.