AMEX MOVES TO HALT EXODUS

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

American Express Financial Advisors, tired of costly court battles over top producers flying the coop for independent brokerages, finally did something about it: it bought its own.

AmEx snatched up Securities America Inc., an Omaha, Neb., firm with 1,200 reps. Eventually, AmEx wants to give its 8,800 planners the option of affiliating with Securities America and earning the brokerage industry’s highest payouts – 100% of commissions for top-selling brokers. That way, they can feel just like independent advisers – paying for their own offices and overhead -without actually leaving Big Green.

But AmEx doesn’t want to make the alternative too attractive; it still needs an army of reps to sell its insurance policies and mutual funds, the advice unit’s biggest profit generator. So it plans to rejigger its own pay plan to make it more competitive with independents.

The deal also worked out just fine for Securities America founder Stephen Wild. In August, he took advantage of an unusually generous non-compete agreement with AmEx to launch Financial Continuum LLC, designed to help lawyers and accountants break into the financial-advice field.