Regulating You Stresses Them Out After months of trying to fill the position, the SEC hired a psychologist this summer to help boost flagging morale. It seems to have worked. A report by the Government Accountability Office early in the year...

Back in the day, Janus Capital Group could proudly boast that its funds sold themselves. Individual investors paged through papers and magazines and feasted on ads describing the sizzling performance of its tech-heavy growth funds. Impressed, they...

In September, Dale Brown, the chief executive of the Financial Services Institute (FSI), a lobbying group representing 106 member firms with more than 124,000 independent-contractor broker/dealers, hosted an industry conference attended by the...

If you haven't gotten your hooks into enough baby boomer clients those 70 million-plus Americans born between 1946 and 1964 who are now heading toward retirement Congress is about to give you a second chance. Sometime early next year, or perhaps...

Now that it's standing on its own two feet, Ameriprise Financial is ready to spend some dollars and it's got more than a few to spare, thanks to a $1 billion bequest from former parent American Express. The firm, formerly known as American Express...

Regulators fired their first shot in what figures to be a round of enforcement actions against brokerages for abusive sales practices related to 529 college savings plans.

Selling proprietary product via a firm’s own sales force was once considered a great strategy for maximizing revenue. In another sign that that strategy is dead (as if you needed one): UBS and Ameriprise are now embroiled in separate class...

IT TOOK SOME TIME, but the brokerage industry finally is coming to terms with the death in the family. In this case, the dear departed is a way of operating that is now gone for good. Like any mourner, the industry has collectively gone through...

Surveying the financial services landscape back in April 1998, Raymond Mason, CEO of Legg Mason, told Barron's how he saw the future: I have believed that there are three businesses over the next ten years that all financial-services companies...

After several months of deliberations and input from all 18,000 of its employees, the soon-to-be-spun-off American Express Financial Advisors selected as its new name (drum roll please) Ameriprise. Apparently that's better than the ones left on...