The relentless march of technological change is slowly taking its toll upon undifferentiated financial advisors, casting a bright light of transparency on questionable products, commoditizing simple investment transactions and even somewhat more complicated portfolio construction, and forcing advisors to move up the value chain to providing real, substantive, high-quality financial advice to justify their cost. Yet at the same time, the push towards providing financial advice to solve complex problems creates a demand for advanced educational programs to provide advisors the knowledge they need to deliver those solutions.
Despite the opportunities created by this changing environment, though, the recent announcement by the American College of changes to its flagship ChFC program spent as much time continuing to fight its ill-fated ChFC versus CFP designation wars as it did talking about its own program – an odd juxtaposition given that the CFP marks now have 50% more designees than the ChFC, 5 times the consumer awareness, and for all the recent criticism that the CFP Board has taken regarding the enforcement of its compensation disclosure rules at least it has an enforcement mechanism to publicly sanction its designees or even revoke the certification, unlike the American College.
Against this backdrop, today’s blog post is about both the future of advisor education for all the institutions that teach financial advisors, and is an open letter to the American College in particular, its new leadership, and its board of directors, to take advantage of the unique opportunity presented with the organization’s transition to incoming CEO Bob Johnson to finally move past its ill-fated ChFC versus CFP designation wars, its hypocritical criticisms of the CFP marks that the organization itself teaches, and strategically reposition itself to support the emerging need for deeper post-CFP specializations and niche educational programs for financial advisors... or leave the door open once again for other institutions to step up.