NAPFA searching for new CEO at pivotal time for profession

The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, a small but influential group of fee-only planners, is looking for a new CEO at a time when the profession remains mired in the industry's fundamental debate over fiduciary rules.

NAPFA will say goodbye to Geof Brown on Nov. 15 after he served as the nonprofit organization's CEO for nine years — a period in which the organization doubled its membership to 4,400 planners. NAPFA's strict standards requiring financial advisors to avoid sales commissions, refuse FINRA registration and eliminate as many conflicts of interest as possible keep its ranks lower than other trade organizations. Those lower numbers belie NAPFA's influence in the profession, though.

NAPFA

Over its 39-year history, NAPFA members have helped spawn the life planning movement, incorporating dreams and aspirations into financial advice; taken a lead role in fraught debates about the nature of fees and conflicts of interest; and, more recently, created a diversity, equity and inclusion program aimed at creating more pathways into the profession. The organization also argues strongly for requiring every practice in the industry to place its clients' interests ahead of its own under the fiduciary duty. Currently, brokers operating with commissions only need to act in a client's best interest, which is a lower standard than the fiduciary duty.

The organization remains supportive of a "a fee-only financial planning standard" for the industry, according to board Chair Karla McAvoy, a San Francisco-based managing director with The Mather Group. NAPFA's CEO provides "that face and that consistency for the association over time" in the continuing debate, she said in an interview.

"The CEO absolutely is going to have — and needs to have — a key role in continuing to push that forward," McAvoy said. "We make baby steps, and a lot of it depends on the makeup of Congress at any given time. It's not an issue that we want to go away, and it's an area where our members push us to move forward. And we will."

Fellow NAPFA members wished the departing Brown well in his next role as CEO of the Illinois CPA Society while expressing hopes for the organization's future. Brown is "a strong leader and a great guy to boot," said Dan Moisand, a Melbourne, Florida-based planner with Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo, who is a longtime member of NAPFA in addition to being on the board of the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards and a past president of the Financial Planning Association. Those three groups formed the Financial Planning Coalition nearly a decade ago to push for tougher fiduciary standards, but the FPA will leave it at the end of the year as it focuses on legal protections for the title of "financial planner."

"Geof raised the bar for how the association was run," Moisand said in an email about NAPFA's future. "I'm sad NAPFA is losing him. Whoever becomes his replacement has big shoes to fill but also a great opportunity to further evolve the group."

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Part of that evolution in recent years has revolved around boosting diversity in a profession that is predominantly white and male and at risk of losing touch with future generations. As CEO, Brown started a discussion at NAPFA's 2017 spring conference "when DEI wasn't as popular as it is today," said Cameo Roberson, the founder of Atlas Park Consulting & Finance, an operations consultancy to RIAs. She and NAPFA board member Daphne Jordan of Austin, Texas-based Pioneer Wealth Management Group created the framework for the program.

"Geof's vision and tenacity to push the needle was unwavering, and we felt support through both words and deeds," Roberson said in an email, describing Brown's backing as "critical for making true impact" through the program. "This important initiative may not have had the wheels to take off and thrive if it wasn't so top of mind for him," she added.

In addition to working with NAPFA's DEI Steering Committee and its other volunteers serving in its chapters and on its various boards, the next CEO could grab the center stage in the debate around fiduciary rules. Despite some signs that the SEC is moving toward a stronger approach to enforcement of the two-year-old Regulation Best Interest, many fiduciary planners view the rule as insufficient for reining in conflicts and defining exactly what is in a client's best interest. The industry has been struggling over the debate for at least the past decade, with the passage of Dodd-Frank in 2010 and a 2016 Fiduciary Rule getting overturned in court two years later.

Brown's replacement and other NAPFA members will "need to get more of the word out" to fee-only planners about the group's importance, said Carolyn McClanahan of Jacksonville, Florida-based Life Planning Partners. A former board member, McClanahan recalled a time when the organization was referred to as "the mouth that roars" in the planning community.

"NAPFA has always been the standard bearer of what true fin planners should be, and of course I'm biased because I've been a member forever," she said. "The profession is catching up. There are more and more people out there who are doing financial planning."

Indeed, McAvoy estimated that there are thousands of fee-only planners who aren't currently members of NAPFA. The cancellation of in-person events during the pandemic wiped out NAPFA's conferences, but the organization is holding one in Denver on Oct. 20-22. 

NAPFA's board hopes to have chosen its interim CEO by then, said McAvoy, whose tenure will end when chair-elect Jeff Jones of Huntsville, Alabama-based Longview Financial Advisors replaces her on Sept. 1. She, Jones and St. Louis-based Buckingham Strategic Wealth President Wendy Hartman, the group's 2023 chair-elect, will lead the search efforts as part of a personnel committee adding more members to its ranks in the next few weeks and months.

"We do plan to make this an inclusive process," McAvoy said. "We've got some good leads on search firms, and we feel confident that our process is really going to find someone great for NAPFA for the coming years."