Thirteen men at an airport hotel. How financial planning was invented

12 December 1969

Financial planning as a profession has a birthday. On 12 December 1969 thirteen men met at the O'Hare Inn, an airport hotel outside Chicago. The man who called the meeting, Loren Dunton, "had been an extremely successful salesman of tangible products, such as silverware and books".¹ He had never sold a financial product. The other twelve were leaders in the mutual-fund and insurance businesses.¹ A body called the Society for Financial Counselling Ethics had been formed six months earlier, in June.¹

The idea was to turn selling financial products into a profession, with a name, a school, a credential and a code of ethics. The name was financial planning.

The school

A college followed within a year. It was chartered in 1970 as the International College for Financial Counseling and renamed the College for Financial Planning that fall. Sources differ on whether it began operating in 1971 or 1972.² The first examination, in 1972, was 150 essay questions.² Dunton "never received full payment for all the cash outlays and services" he had put into it.¹

On 13 October 1973 the first class received the designation Certified Financial Planner. The body that now owns the mark publishes two sizes for that class: 35 on its history page, 42 in its fiftieth-anniversary press release.³ No document reconciles the two. The graduates formed the Institute of Certified Financial Planners the same year.

The profession builds itself

The institutions came in a steady sequence. A journal in 1979.⁴ A standards body in July 1985, renamed the CFP Board of Standards in 1994, with a code of ethics from 1986 and the first 25 registered university programs by 1987.⁵ A merger of the two practitioner bodies into the Financial Planning Association on 1 January 2000, with more than 30,000 members.⁶ By October 2023 there were more than 97,000 people holding the CFP mark, and the board's history page now says more than 100,000.⁵

What happened to the school

The College for Financial Planning was owned from 1985 by a foundation created to hold it. On 23 September 1997 that foundation sold the college to Apollo Group, the parent of the for-profit University of Phoenix, for $17.5 million in cash plus shares worth about another $17.5 million, with assumed liabilities including about $17.2 million of tuition already paid in advance. The college then had more than 20,000 students.⁷ Kaplan bought it from Apollo in 2017.⁸

The proceeds of that sale became the endowment of the National Endowment for Financial Education, which is now the one institution in this field documented as refusing corporate and government money.⁷ Its independence was bought by selling the profession's school to a for-profit university company.

What this founding was

Three things are true at once, and it matters which one you say. The convener was a sales trainer who had never sold a financial product. The attendees were leaders of the industries whose products would be sold. And the school they founded was sold, a generation later, to a for-profit education company. The profession was founded by sellers to dignify selling. That is not a secret; it is the story the profession tells about itself, minus the adjective.

It was not, at its founding, a reaction to households being harmed. That reaction came fourteen years later, from inside the profession, and it is the next chapter.