What I saw was a portion of that professional core fully engaged on the journey to being the best practitioners they could be through a program that beautifully married the art and science of financial planning. There was little talk of robos. The value of planning was so abundantly clear.
There was no town hall meeting with association brass and no one seemed to notice, or care. There is a place for those, but they also often turn into griping sessions about CFP Board and/or FPA. No, this retreat was a retreat focused solely on doing the best for clients.
The old guard, despite its success, was still pushing themselves. They were joined by a terrific group of young and first time retreat attendees who worked just as hard and were just as enthusiastic for financial planning as a profession as the veterans. A similar vibe was pervasive at the NAPFA Spring Conference.
For most of my career, planners have lamented that they couldn’t get the ear of government. FPA had to actually sue the SEC to get them to do the right thing and stop a further erosion of the enforcement of the Advisor Act. But in 2015, we saw signs someone was listening.
Look at all the talk about fiduciary. The DOL actually has a proposal out. Like it or not, it is a conversation that needs to happen. Who pushed that? It sure wasn’t the brokerage or insurance industry. It was the organizations representing the community of financial planner professionals, many of such professionals who work, ironically, in brokerage or insurance environments.
The President of the United States called on a financial advisor at a press conference, and she actually was a real financial planner, not one in title only. When I saw Sheryl Garrett stand and be recognized, I thought “Dang. We have made some progress!” Twenty-five years ago, that kind of thing probably would have been dubbed as pure fantasy by the investment industry.
I understand if you do not view a CFP Board court win, the DOL proposal debate or the President’s recognition with much enthusiasm. Mine is tempered too. There is still a long way to go, but we are moving in the right direction.
From time to time, I have been fortunate enough to be in leadership roles for the profession and have learned a few things from the experience. Although I have confidence in the leaders, I am certain that the people who will get financial planning to the professional recognition it deserves are not the leaders of these organizations. The leaders can help (or hinder), but the driving force of change is the behavior of financial planning practitioners.
If those holding themselves out as professional financial planners act like professional financial planners, the public will respond by seeking to work with professional financial planners. It is a shame that doing what you say is a differentiator in the marketplace, but that’s where we are as a society these days in many fields, not just personal finance.
Even as I sensed the organizations I belong to stalling, I could see my peers around the country were not letting that slow them down. They continued to only make promises they could keep and act like bona fide fiduciaries even if they were not going to be held to that standard by regulators.