IAQFP was officially formed in June 2001, primarily as the burgeoning Financial Planning professions advocacy “group,” that was initially known as the “Concerned Planners Group (CPG),” by Paul M. League, CFP® and Gib Kerr, CFP®, ChFC®, CLU.
Our focus was to bring together all those persons trained and credentialed in the Financial Planning (“FP”) learned discipline and methodology, so that we could speak in one voice about changes our constituency of over 100,000 saw as vitally necessary to growing a substantive and quality profession.
What was clear was that the primary influencers (CFP Board and the FPA) were taking Stakeholders down a path that they did find efficacious, and in the process Stakeholders interests, as well as those of the public, were not being addressed or considered (see our Articles Archives for details on this history).
Stakeholder popular demand caused us to expand to better address the ongoing and evolving concerns of our constituency, and so in March 2003 we evolved into the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION of QUALIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS (“IAQFP”), and introduced our single, unifying designation identifier for the profession and its professionals; namely: QFP—Qualified Financial Planner.
IAQFP, believing in the Financial Planning professions ideal of “One Profession—One Designation,” introduced the QFP—QUALIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER credential in March 2003. We did this to unite the profession, as well as to bring focus and distinction to the Financial Planning professional skill set and field, along with simplifying the designations and credentials “alphabet soup/designations maze” from 5 competing designations (ChFC®, PFS™, CFP®, MSFS & MS, the latter two with a concentrated study of the Financial Planning methodology) into a single, unifying credential: QFP—Qualified Financial Planner.
IAQFP continued to expand into a certifying body for the profession of Financial Planning. issuing its’ QFP Designation as an IAQFP Certified—Financial Planner designation.
IAQFP had determined that the public had suffered enough having to live with widespread confusion over “Who’s Who.”
Stakeholders needed to respond, and an organization to serve their interests and to who they could turn to bring about a solution was born…and that organization became IAQFP.
—–