LETTER: ARE WE ON CFP PAYROLL?

Your Jan. 26 editorial championing a single certified financial planner designation for all financial planners (“Cut the babble and get together”) is most alarming. This issue of promoting the CFP mark seems to be a regular part of your publication. Are you paid by the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards and the College of Financial Planning to advocate it?

I happen to be a member of the International Association for Financial Planning. While I am not a CFP, a CLU, a ChFC, a CPA or one of the other dozen or more innovative designations that also are being promoted and marketed – and that also offer similar trademark parchment of certification connoting the authorized practice of financial planning – I believe I am a qualified, knowledgeable and competent professional. In 24 years of practice, serving thousands of people, I have yet to have a client or a prospective client ask if I was a CFP. While this designation is important to a few in the profession, it is for the most part nonexistent to the public. People trust people, not certificates.

Many “licensed” life insurance agents, accountants, attorneys and stock brokers who have been in the financial planning business for 20 or more years see this new trademark craze as a money-making scheme and feeding frenzy among a few promoters who pretend to be the only one with the superior knowledge and competence to protect the public’s best interest against unscrupulous or incompetent practitioners. It’s an unconscionable movement to get power, profit and control among the unlearned.

Just about anyone can find a way to get a desirable “financial planner” designation or trademark and still be unethical, immoral and incompetent. There are many so-called “certified” financial planners who are unqualified to best serve the public’s interest.

The InvestmentNews editorial suggests we should all have the CFP designation. This mind-set is most alarming and I believe dangerous to our industry. Pushing the CFP
as the “only” future designation at the expense of all others is elitism and arrogance.

Would you promote only doctors who are board certified in internal medicine? Where is the American spirit of individualism?

Many financial planners who are not CFPs but who are experienced, knowledgeable and competent professionals in the field of life insurance, annuities, securities, law and accounting are grievously offended by your notion that “they” are not competent or qualified or best serving their clients because they are not in concert with certain organizations’ agendas. Your efforts to push for a single, approved and recognized designation as the status quo in order to be a qualified financial planner is unacceptable. And your narrow view that the CFP hierarchy should have exclusive right to collect excessive fees and discriminate against other non-CFPs with the intent to prejudice the public against all others and have its members control the financial services community is anathema.

Our industry is already overregulated with ordinances, statutes, codes and enforcement agencies to protect the public’s best interest. Whenever those who seek power and gain make up the rhetoric, the by-laws and the rules of the game by which they insist we must all play also appoint themselves as the referee and appeals board, then the industry is corrupt and finished.

BARRY L. COX

Consolidated Financial

San Antonio

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