Financial planning has long witnessed an unfortunate “gap” between practitioners and academia. As the stereotype goes, the practitioner community to too focused on strategies, techniques, and application, while the academic community spends too much of its time on research that is too basic or too abstract. Well, at the Academy of Financial Services meeting held in conjunction with the FPA’s annual convention, that gap appears to be narrowing, quickly.
As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but fortunately we don't need to remember the past ourselves, at least when it comes to financial planning. E. Denby Brandon, Jr., and H. Oliver Welch, have done it for us in their new book "The History of Financial Planning: The Transformation of Financial Services."
In a message board thread on financial-planning.com, initiated by Harold Evensky, there is an interesting discussion of the fact that apparently State Farm has directed all of their agents to voluntarily relinquish their CFP marks. It appears that an overarching fiduciary standard is "not conductive to [their] business model."
After nearly a decade of ongoing complaints about the poor communication with respect to the CFP Board and changes/initiatives that it launches, it appears the organization, under the guidance of its "new" CEO Kevin Keller, has turned over a new leaf for 2009. Or at least, it's off to a good start.
Noted financial planning writer and commentator Bob Veres has initiated an entry on Change.org, entitled "Fix the financial regulators by imposing a fiduciary standard on all who offer financial advice." Will this be a new way to make the call for fiduciary standards better heard in Washington?Read More...
The results are in for FPA's first ever video competition on "How NOT To Do Financial Planning", and congratulations to Dave and Rob Daline of Minnetonka, MN, for their winning video "Winston the Pug."
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Continuing the fiduciary financial planning momentum created by the CFP Board's release last year of their updated Standards of Professional Conduct, the FPA has promulgated one of the first formal statements of a "Standard of Care" for the delivery of financial planning services - a step that many consider to be crucial for financial planning to become widely recognized as a profession. But is the planning community really ready to go where this road leads?
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A new campaign is underway to help promote the visibility of independent RIAs to the general public. But the focus is not to increase awareness of the differences between RIA and broker/dealer compensation, nor to explore the fiduciary versus suitability debate. Instead, it's simply to convey the message "We exist."
In the midst of the financial planning community's struggles to figure out how to serve the mass middle market in an effective manner, a surprising new entrant to the field may lead the way in showing how to get it done right. Welcome to the Personal Financial Counselor Network, brought to the U.S. military courtesy of the Department of Defense!
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In a press release this morning, the CFP Board announced the creation of the new "Council on Education" for the purposes of developing a model curriculum, determining continuing education requirements, reviewing course providers, and implementing a peer review process, among other things. Huh? Isn't that what the CFP Board already does!?
