What did we read in 2014?The Professional Planner Top 40

In 2014 Professional Planner published more than 1500 online articles, on issues and subjects that affect individual professional financial planners, financial planning businesses and the financial planning profession.

That works out at an average of 30 articles every week for the 50 weeks a year in which we publish.

We covered regulatory upheaval, the ongoing drive towards professionalism, people movements, the aligned-versus-non-aligned debate, the pronouncements of the profession’s luminaries, conferences, congresses and other confabs.

We’ve highlighted the profession’s leading practitioners.

We’ve striven to provide a diversity of views and voices, and to include expert opinions when necessary and appropriate. We’ve reported the facts, and we’ve produced opinion and comment.

There’s been a lot been going on.

If 2014 can be simply summarised, then one way of doing it might be to say it was a year when some solid foundations were set down for building a profession on, but when there was also an extreme amount of upheaval and certainty. A small amount of clarity was achieved late in the year, when at least the grandfathering arrangements under the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) laws were finally sorted out – or so it seemed at the time of publication.

An feature of the Professional Planner website is a section called Cut & Paste. It is a direct line into the seemingly constant stream of information produced by the financial planning profession itself and by suppliers of products and services to financial planners. It does nothing more than convey this information, unaltered, to Professional Planner’s readers.

However, it serves the additional purpose of clearing the decks, as it were, and allowing Professional Planner to focus where we can actually add value, perspective or insight, instead of an alternative approach (favoured elsewhere) of passing off press releases as our own work, or as anything more significant than they actually are.

Cut & Paste is doing exactly what it’s intended to do – the fourth-most read article in 2014 was a Cut & Paste article: a press release from Findex in October announcing it had agreed to purchase Crowe Horwath. And one of the most-read articles in this past week has been the release of the Life Insurance Working Group (LIWG) interim report.

Tapping into a range of views and opinions is a critical part of the approach Professional Planner takes to covering the financial planning profession. We welcome insights and opinions from our readers, and to help facilitate a diversity of opinion, we have created a set of contributor guidelines. These are designed to set some parameters regarding subject matter and style, and to make it as straightforward as possible to have an article published by Professional Planner, online or in print.

We look forward to keeping you up to date in 2015 with the issues that matter to you, your business and your profession. We’ll continue to spotlight issues of professionalism, ethics, technical competence and business excellence; to call out examples of behaviour that run counter to these issues; and to support professional planners dedicated to establishing financial planning as a trusted and respected profession.

But until then, here is a snapshot of what Professional Planner online readers read most in 2014.

1. Has the industry shot itself in the foot?

2. Meet Australia’s most-trusted financial planners. How do you become one of them?

3. Advisers threaten to breakaway from ANZ

4. Findex agrees to acquire Crowe Horwath

5. What if account-based pensions are deemed?

6. Exclusive: ‘Shock and rage’ at Financial Planning Association ultimatum to CBA

7. The professional loneliness of the genuinely independent financial planner

8. Government moves swiftly on FoFA recommendations

9. Great financial planning finally has a value: 23 per cent more in retirement

10. FPA Professionals Congress 2014 Daily News

11. Barrett returns with $100 million and a vision for financial planning