Ahluwalia leads Genworth Financial Wealth Management, which offers support to more than 4,000 advisors with a combined total of $18 billion in assets. With more than 20 years of experience with GE and Genworth, he also has served as president and CEO of Genworth Financial Asset Management, where he oversaw a restructuring of the firm's wealth management business.

1. What makes you different from your competitors?
The first thing is, we have an open architecture platform. People want transparency and objectivity, that's an underlying force for consumers, regulators and financial advisors. With open architecture, we're saying we're going to bring what we believe are the best choices from third parties. It's sort of like offering a Trader Joe's model to advisors as opposed to Costco. When my wife or I go into Trader Joe's, we know they've got the selection down to the best items.

2. You've bought coaching firm, Quantuvis Consulting, to help financial advisors with practice management. What do you offer?
After each quarter, we spend eight hours with advisors in 13 cities talking about markets, specific strategies on our platform and what they're doing. We also talk about business-building ideas. That's a core part of our management offering. We also have more fundamental things like our once-a-year mastery educational curriculum, a two-and-a-half-day curriculum. You're running your own business. We ask, 'What is your mission or vision for what you're doing in life?' Some people will talk about growth, so we start working through ideas on that-referral marketing, centers of influence and so forth. Also, advisors thinking about buying a practice, overhauling or selling their own practice can do an intensive one-on-one meeting with coaches from Quantuvis, or they can go through a two-year program, meeting in groups of 25 advisors every six months.

3. So how do you help advisors manage their client relationships?
We offer help with back office outsourcing for advisors. Most advisors did not go into business because they are operations people. They want to manage and help a client achieve a goal. The operational piece is a necessary element of achieving that. We do things like rebalancing portfolios, ongoing manager due diligence, and statement generation.

4. How have things most changed over the past few years?
The biggest change is that advisors had clients who were paralyzed and the advisors didn't know how to regain the clients' confidence. Despite all the talk of modern portfolio theory or buy-and-hold, the violent moves in the markets tested people's [mettle]. When the markets moved 5%, people [could] handle it. When they moved 20% or 30%, they [couldn't]. We need to change that mentality by looking at ways to manage money by not letting the emotion take control because people panic. A good advisor helps you get out without pulling the ripcord.

5. What's your main worry now that things seem to have calmed down?
The concern of the advisor is that the end consumer can have a short memory. One of the conversations advisors are having now is how to maintain the discipline of the client. We work with an advisor on how to emotionally connect with an end consumer. The client is going to be inundated with various mediums (like cable news) highlighting daily events, and you're talking about long-term issues like retirement and college. Our advisors are helping protect the financial security of our clients. We help them bring more discipline to their clients.