My understanding is that the official mission statement, adopted in the year 2000, is: "The mission of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards is that the public values, has access to and benefits from competent financial planning." Huh!?
Not a bad mission statement for somebody. It says some nice things. It makes financial planning seem important. Who could quarrel? Well, me, for one. It is appalling and entirely inappropriate. Dave, call me crazy but this sounds a whole lot like a practitioner's mission or a membership organization's mission. It is not a regulator's mission.
What's wrong with it? First, it does not express accountability for the organization's actions. How do mere stakeholders measure CFP Board success or failure? Worse, it opens doors to anything and everything. These are generally problems for well-financed organizations with expansionist tendencies.
More problematically, it asserts the appropriate responsibilities of others as its own. Thus, nasty conflict is unavoidable. Confusion reigns.
In my humble opinion, regulators ought not actively care if the public values that which it ostensibly regulates. It is sort of like a motor vehicles department promoting the joys of automobile driving or a department of agriculture advertising carrots. How about the Federal Reserve promoting dollar-based trade? It is wrong, wrong, wrong. Standard-setting regulatory bodies just shouldn't do cheerleading. That job is for its practitioners. It is no good for CFP Board to take this on. It only leads to trouble.
What CFP Board can do is maintain its standards at such levels to justify public perception that these marks mean their proud bearers can be trusted.
Obviously, CFP Board does not provide services to the public. So what's up with "... the public ... has access to ... competent financial planning"? CFP Board cannot create either competency or numbers of practitioners. It can only certify competency or decertify it. It cannot generate competent practitioners. That's for businesses and educators, not CFP Board. Again, its markholders do that, together with the assistance and support of educational institutions and programs and their professional associations. Again, it is not good for CFP Board to take this on. Again, it only leads to trouble.
What CFP Board can do is to assure that those promising competent financial planning have the credibility of meaningful marks.
CFP Board's mission is certainly not that "... the public benefits ...." That is uniquely between advisor and client. CFP Board is not even in the room when the public benefits. Indeed, it is not invited. Who knows if the public benefits? But everyone knows if the marks are meaningful.
Alarmingly, I have heard past CFP Board leadership assert other missions: "The mission of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards is to protect the public" or "... to lead the financial planning profession."