The revision to the CFP Board’s code is the first in a decade and significantly broadens CFP certificate holders’ fiduciary responsibility to put investors’ best interests first when delivering financial advice.

The eight B-Ds that want the CFP Board to delay its standards are Ameriprise Financial Services, AXA Advisors, Edward Jones, LPL Financial, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, RBC Wealth Management US, UBS Financial and Wells Fargo Advisors.

These companies account for 18,200 of the 80,000 CFPs the proposed code would impact.

The brokerage associations that represent the eight firms, the Financial Services Institute and SIFMA, also asked the CFP Board for a delay. Both organizations are plaintiffs in a lawsuit pending in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Dallas that would force the U.S. Department of Labor to rescind its fiduciary standards for qualified retirement accounts.

If the CFP Board won’t delay its best-interest standards until after the SEC acts, the eight firms said in a comment letter delivered to the CFP Board on February 2 that it should limit its fiduciary standard to instances where an advisor engages in very narrowly defined financial planning.

In particular, the eight broker-dealers object to the CFP Board’s definition of financial planning as “a collaborative process that helps maximize a client’s potential for meeting life goals through ‘financial advice’ that integrates relevant elements of the client’s personal and financial circumstances,” they said in a comment letter to the CPF Board.

“For example, the final Standards of Conduct should state that financial planning is not intended to apply where a representative of a broker-dealer merely makes a recommendation after obtaining relevant personal and investment-related information from the client, as required by Finra,” the group said. For clarification, the Finra requirement mandates that registered reps give customers a questionnaire that takes a few minutes to answer. It does not require registered reps to put investors’ best interests first.

“The revised proposal continues to require CFP certificants to deliver a level of service that may not be warranted for all investors or in all circumstances,” the letter from the eight companies continued. “Providing financial advice simply does not require a prescribed, time-intensive and potentially costly financial planning process in every instance.”

The attempt by the B-D industry to delay a fiduciary standard “isn’t surprising,” FPA’s Paré said. “But it’s not as if they’re putting together any new arguments. We have been hearing the same thing for the past 11 or 12 years. As an organization, we believe so strongly in what the CFP Board is doing and fiduciary standards that we were willing to sue the SEC in 2004. I think the CFP Board is doing the right thing, and we are applauding them.”

The FPA won its lawsuit against the SEC in 2007, forcing the agency to vacate its so-called “Merrill Lynch rule,” which gave the broker-dealer industry a carve-out from fiduciary regulations when companies decided to put on their brokerage hats instead. Despite the ruling and its headlong push into the fee-based advice business, the industry has been successful in preserving its carve-out from fiduciary standards at the SEC.