CFP Board Withdraws Its Pended Trademark – ‘CFP PRACTITIONER’

October 2000

By Paul M. League, QFP, CFP^®

www.IAQFP.org / info@IAQFP.org

The CFP Board did a 180 degree turn around on September 2000 and announced in their “CFP Board Report” Newsletter that they would not renew the pended Trademark filing of ‘CFP PRACTITIONER’.

The stated reason they gave for pending it in the first place was to “preserve their options should the term have become widely used in the future”. Of course, it had changed during their “handling” of it from a “mere term” to a pended Trademark, a significant modification from its origins with the former IAFP’s “Registry of Financial Planning Practitioners”. The CFP Board persistently told Certificants is was “just a descriptive term”, but neglected to add that it was really much, much more; namely, a filed, and pended, new and competing Trademark.

In addition to the above noted announcement they later also stopped using it as a Trademark in their publications and other media, reduced the letter “P” in Practitioner to a lower case “p”, and in this way and others dramatically altered the way in which they used the “term”. They added that the word “practitioner” would only be used henceforth as only one of many currently used generic “noun modifiers” to modify the CFP^® mark (i.e. like “Certificant”, and like designee used to be but was modified to “CFP Board designee” & applied to those persons not yet “certified”).

Following their announcement, and after, I cautioned Certificants from accepting their announcement at face value; however, many became complacent anyway, assuming that all was rectified and well, despite these cautions and the obvious warnings contained in the history that preceded the controversy.

As pointed out in the linked CPG(sm) Board Position Statement, the CFP Board’s present usage of the “term”, ‘CFP^® practitioner’, remains dangerously flawed, and calls for the active concern of all CFP^® Certificants (click HERE for the complete details).