The Financial Planning Association (FPA) today announced it gave Don Pitti its 2008 P. Kemp Fain Jr. Award. An early advocate of financial planning, Pitti served as chairman of two of FPA's predecessor organizations, the Society of Financial Counseling and the International Association for Financial Planning (IAFP), and more recently, as chair of the Foundation for Financial Planning.
Unlike the vast majority of past recipients of the Fain award, Pitti was never a financial planning practitioner. However, he was a visionary thinker who was instrumental in working towards the development of financial planning as a profession.
FPA gives its P. Kemp Fain Jr. award each year to an individual who has made contributions to the financial planning profession in areas such as professional activities, society, and academia and upholds the organization's core values of competence, integrity, relationships and stewardship. Past recipients included such noted practitioners as Charles Hughes, Jack Blankinship, Richard Wagner, Alexandra Armstrong and Bill Carter.
Pitti joined the IAFP in 1969. He spent much of his career in senior marketing and management positions at Nuveen Investments and J. & W. Seligman. After he retired in 1994, Pitti became the founding director of the Financial Services Institute in the Tobin College of Business at St. John's University in New York, where he still serves as an adjunct professor of finance.