“The need for advice from competent and ethical financial planners who put their clients’ interests first has never been greater,” said Stephen O’Connor, CFP, 2009 FPSB Board chairperson. “On its five-year anniversary, FPSB seeks to initiate a global conversation about the state of the financial planning profession around the world, and to discuss what FPSB and our stakeholders need to accomplish to ensure consumers value and benefit from financial planning delivered by qualified professionals.”

The “State of the Financial Planning Profession in the ‘Post Trust’ Era” paper highlights how consumer demand, shifting firm practices, regulatory initiatives and globalization have shaped the emerging financial planning profession and driven growth of CFP certification globally. In analyzing the stage of evolution of the financial planning profession, FPSB’s position paper discusses the problems caused by inconsistent definitions of the terms “financial planning” and “financial planner,” and reviews some of the barriers to consumers recognizing financial planning as a distinct professional practice.

“As the international standards-setting organization for financial planning, FPSB’s mission is to establish global standards and a professional framework for the practice of financial planning,” said Noel Maye, FPSB CEO. “For financial planning to gain worldwide recognition as a profession and for members of the public to receive appropriate standards of care in financial planning engagements, FPSB needs to engage regulators, consumer groups, educators, financial services firms and the global financial planning community in discussing and introducing programs and practices consistent with those of established professions such as law, medicine and accounting.”

Following the release of its global position paper on the state of the financial planning profession, FPSB plans to engage global stakeholders in discussions on topics ranging from: compensation and conflicts of interest; standards of care for financial planning clients; title protection for those holding out as financial planners; pathways to financial planner professionalism; financial literacy and consumer outreach efforts; and building trust in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.

Celebrating its five-year anniversary on 1 December 2009, FPSB manages, develops and operates certification, education and related programs for financial planning organizations to benefit the global community by establishing, upholding and promoting worldwide professional standards in financial planning. FPSB demonstrates its commitment to excellence with the marks of professional distinction – CFP, CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER and CFP Logo Mark.

With more than 120,000 CFP professionals worldwide, territories where FPSB has a nonprofit member organization include: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chinese Taipei, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States. For more, visit fpsb.org.

One of the most crucial yet simplest tasks of the financial planner just took an evolutionary step from paper and pencil to digitized form with the release of PreciseFP (TM), a Web-based client data-gathering application.
Spectrum Input, LLC, an Alpharetta, Georgia-based company, formally released its flagship product to the financial planning and advising industry today wrapped in a sterling review from Joel Bruckenstein, columnist with MorningstarAdvisor and industry expert on applied technology for financial advisor professionals. Calling PreciseFP a “promising new practice-management tool”, user rates for PreciseFP have grown 260% since its soft release in early August and the release of Bruckenstein’s review.
Using a virtual advisor dashboard to customize and manage the online questionnaire and a client portal that can be easily accessed through a link provided by the advisor, PreciseFP was specifically designed to address the key barriers that may have kept advisors in the paper/pencil mode longer than practical.

“In an industry flush with Web-based financial planning and portfolio management tools — each one more sophisticated than the last — we were surprised to discover such a large percentage of financial professionals still collecting client data with a paper questionnaire,” observed Don Whalen, CFP®, co-founder of Spectrum Input, LLC, and a practicing comprehensive financial planner.

“While some financial planning applications come with their own online questionnaire, it’s typically a proprietary tool that’s available only if you buy the application,” added Whalen. “We saw no reason why every planner shouldn’t have an efficient way to capture client data and be able to access it for CRM, compliance record keeping, yearly updating, and quarterly reporting.”

Along with co-founder, Sebastian Skwarek, a specialist in electronic forms development and systems integration, the Spectrum Input team targeted client usability as key to making the online product a success.
“Ease of use and security are the two biggest concerns when you’re introducing an online questionnaire to clients who have always put pencil to paper to provide their financial history and relevant data,” says Skwarek, “so we focused on an intuitive user interface that guides the client in making logical choices at each data entry point. Security of that data is insured by maintaining the highest standards in encrypted technology that dramatically reduce the risk of identity theft that clients may be concerned about.”

Compatible with financial planning or portfolio management applications that exchange data using standard data exchange methods (e.g. SML), Whalen and Skwarek are running strong out of the gate by tackling integration with two industry heavyweights—Money Tree Software (TM) and MoneyGuidePro (TM)—both financial planning software applications. Integration with Money Tree was recently completed and is just starting with MoneyGuidePro (TM) according to Skwarek, Spectrum Input’s lead for integration processes.

Whalen and Skwarek anticipate a fairly rapid assimilation of PreciseFP into the marketplace. As a longtime active member of both the FPA and NAPFA, two prominent national financial planning organizations, Whalen used his professional network of planners as beta testers for early versions of the product.

“Precise FP represents the future of financial planning,” says one such colleague, Russ Thornton of Thornton Wealth Management. “It provides a consistent system which (helps) improve the client experience and create more efficient systems within a planner’s business.”