8 Big Advisory Firms With Lots of CFPs

A growing number of firms across the U.S. wealth management industry see hiring and developing talent with the certified financial planner (CFP) designation as an important part of their competitive strategy, especially as their clients demand deeper and more personalized planning experiences. The approach makes a lot of sense, experts agree, as many in the public and in the industry view the CFP mark as one of the most important credentials a professional can attain when it comes to proving and maintaining their knowledge of the most important financial planning skills. Advisors say that studying for the test and obtaining the CFP designation is a great way to obtain comprehensive planning knowledge that can then be applied toward building a practice or serving clients, depending on which area of the financial services profession one operates in. In this sense, the focus on getting more CFPs in the door should come as no surprise, nor should the expanding efforts of firms to encourage their staffers to pursue the designation. In fact, in the view of Penny Pennington, managing partner at Edward Jones, getting more CFP talent into the firm's many branches is an essential strategy for the future, so much so that the firm has declared the goal of becoming the advisory organization with the most CFPs under one brand in the United States. "We managed to get 600 CFPs through the program last year," Pennington recently told ThinkAdvisor. "We have more than that are registered this year, and our goal is to have more than 4,000 CFPs on board by the end of the year." Pennington says she is particularly proud of the racial and gender diversity of the firm's CFP talent, and she counts herself among the group of industry leaders who see the CFP Board's efforts to improve the diversity of certificants as a critical initiative for the advisor industry as a whole. "We all know from the pace of demographic change in our country that the next two generations of investors are going to be so much more diverse, and the advisory industry must change to reflect that," Pennington says. See the slideshow for information about eight firms that responded to an informal survey from ThinkAdvisor with information about their CFP representation. Rather than providing an apples-to-apples comparison, the list instead demonstrates the broad and deepening interest in the CFP designation among leading advisory shops.