When it comes to regulatory matters, the fiduciary standard of care issue has seemingly gone from hot potato status to a somnolent remnant of Dodd-Frank financial services reform legislation. But fi360, the Bridgeville, Pa.-based provider of fiduciary education and training programs, says it’s seeing a growing interest in fiduciary matters even if the issue is dragging among regulators.

Fi360 CEO Blaine Aikin says there’s been a surge in the number of financial professionals who’ve attained the Accredited Investment Fiduciary (AIF) or Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst (AIFA) designations administered by fi360. Roughly 6,500 people hold at least one of the two marks (the AIF license grounds its holders in fiduciary practices, and it is a prerequisite for the AIFA, which is for people who want to do fiduciary audits). Aiken notes that fi360 added about 1,000 designees last year and expects to add the same number this year.

In January, fi360 hired Jaleen Edwards to lead its marketing efforts. Edwards, who formerly oversaw business development and strategic alliances at the Financial Planning Association, says fi360 has a fiduciary training agreement with the FPA. It also plans to do more outreach to the steward community—those organizations with fiduciary responsibilities for other people’s investments—including plan sponsors, investment committee members, trustees, foundations and endowments.

This spring, the U.S. Department of Labor is expected to finally unveil its revised proposal for the fiduciary rules governing retirement plans. The department’s rules were laid out in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (Erisa) of 1974 and are seen as more stringent than the SEC’s fiduciary guidelines governing RIAs. When the DOL in 2010 proposed new rules to revise its fiduciary standard for retirement plans, it also included IRAs in the mix.

Some advisory industry groups pushed back against that proposal and what they fear would be the unintended consequences of including IRAs under the revised standard. In response, the DOL decided to rework its revisions and roll them out this year. “It will bring a lot more folks under the fiduciary umbrella than currently exists,” says Aikin, who adds he wouldn’t be surprised if the DOL included some exemptions for IRA advice. (Others aren’t as hopeful. At the Financial Services Institute’s national conference in January, officials for the institute, a trade group for independent broker-dealers, doubted that the DOL’s new guidelines would accept commissions. The result, they said, could cause brokerages to “orphan” millions of small IRA accounts.)

The SEC is also weighing the future of fiduciaries. In 2011, the agency released a study (as part of the Dodd-Frank Act) that recommended applying a uniform fiduciary standard of care for both investment advisors and broker-dealers. It hasn’t moved on the issue since, and Aikin says his recent talks with the SEC lead him to conclude that the agency has more pressing priorities than the fiduciary standard of care. Still, recent published reports hint at some kind of movement this summer.

Given that top officials at Finra, Sifma and various broker-dealer companies have publicly supported a uniform standard of care (disagreeing, of course, about what a uniform standard would entail), Aikin sees hope that the advisor industry itself might push the issue forward.

“Regulatory changes have taken a backseat to marketplace changes,” Aikin says. “I think the story is that advisors who promote ‘fiduciary’ as part of their business proposition are successful in a competitive marketplace.”