Advisor Group has begun to fill its shopping cart.
Royal Alliance, one of AIG Advisor Group's four independent broker-dealers, has added Bloomington, Ill.-based hybrid Affiliated Advisors Group, previously known as First Midwest Securities, to its roster.
Affiliated Advisors Group, which manages approximately $600 million in assets, will operate as an OSJ branch within Royal Alliance, one of the nation's largest broker-dealers. The larger IBD, which ranked No. 10 in last year's FP50 ranking, has $53 billion in total client assets and nearly 2,000 affiliated independent advisors. Affiliated Advisors has 33 advisors concentrated in California, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin.
"Affiliated Advisors Group is an outstanding addition to the Royal Alliance family," Dmitry Goldin, president and CEO of Royal Alliance said in a press release. "The caliber of the firm's advisors and their unique sense of culture make them an excellent fit."
WINDOW SHOPPING
The deal follows about a year of shopping for Advisor Group.
Early last year, newly named Advisor Group president and CEO Erica McGinnis told Financial Planning that the IBD would be looking for smaller B-Ds that it can fold into one of its four existing operations. "It could be 100 advisors, it could be 500 advisors -- something we could integrate into one of our existing brands," McGinnis said at the time.
"We've spent a lot of time focusing on one-by-one recruiting: rep by rep, branch by branch," she added. "And that is hugely important. But the cost of recruiting is going up. We need to have an acquisition strategy."
In addition to Royal Alliance, the AIG network also includes FSC Securities, SagePoint Financial and Woodbury Financial Services, for a combined total of nearly 6,000 advisors.
First Midwest Securities was founded in Milwaukee in 1989 and expanded into the Madison, Wisconsin and Chicago markets.
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