We need more educational institutions to elevate financial planning to an academic major of prominence. That only happens if the programs draw more enrollment and that happens when students get jobs. On most campuses, the dominant presence is not the professional planner, it’s the big financial services companies looking to fuel their sales machines. We need practitioners on campus to boost awareness, educate clients (and parents) about the existence of the profession, about what professional planners actually do, and recruit students.

We also need more planners to grow the profession and improve the succession prospects of true professionals. If we aren’t careful, the VC money and other large organizations buying up practices will take over the delivery of a very personal service and neuter the ability of practitioners to personalize and be as effective. Sound harsh? Take any doctor over age 55 to lunch and ask how medicine has changed in the last 30 years as various groups have bought out private practices. Chances are good, they believe they face impediments to truly caring for patients and delivering the best care, and they are not happy about it.

We need member organizations to become stronger and evolve their services to better serve members as the landscape continues to change. FPA recently set itself back with a bad rollout of a worthy project—revamping its chapter system. I don’t think it will harm the organization as much as CFP Lite hurt the CFP Board but there is damage there that will take time to repair and I fear FPA will spend so much time energy and resources on the chapter issue, other critical issues may be neglected.

FPA once had the means and the will to stand up to the SEC. Who has that now? Is the profession going to let stand the commission's nonsensical interpretation of “solely incidental”? In Release No. IA-5249, the SEC states “…a broker-dealer’s provision of advice … is consistent with the solely incidental prong if the advice is provided in connection with and is reasonably related to the broker-dealer’s primary business of effecting securities transactions.” (emphasis added)

If the advice is coming from a B/D, how can it not be “in connection with and is reasonably related to” the B/D’s primary business? If allowed to stand, there is no advice that can come from a B/D that would be subject to the Advisor Act other than discretionary advisory accounts. The SEC does not have the right to rewrite the law. Who will call them on this?

Many of the pieces of a sound foundation for the establishment of a profession exist today in large part because of the advances the CFP Board has made over the years. We now have an excellent set of high standards for CFP certificants, but the organization is also facing a critical situation after the expose’ in the Wall Street Journal by Jason Zweig.

High standards lose their meaning if we do not have effective enforcement. The WSJ’s high profile exposure of this gap is embarrassing and angers me, frankly. There is too much of a mismatch between what the CFP Board has been saying about how the public can rely on their vetting of CFP certificants and what they have been doing to assure that promise is kept.

Nonetheless, there is another implication of the WSJ piece to note. Assuming the CFP Board tightens things up, the “designation wars” of old are over and the CFP marks have won. The WSJ could have written about any of the other designations, but the author chose to go after CFP, clearly featuring the designation as the leader. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, the CFP marks are the worst thing out there—except for everything else.

I am happy the CFP Board is taking immediate action to get to work on the issue. Their initial steps of adding Broker Check and the IARD links to their online listings and the establishment of a task force seem reasonable. I am still pissed, but also hopeful.