When the news broke on Thursday morning last week that the chief executive officer of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), Mark Rantall, is leaving next March after five years in the job, all eyes naturally turned to his successor – the FPA’s current general manager of policy and conduct, Dante De Gori.

Rantall, De Gori and FPA chair Neil Kendall (pictured) held a brief media conference after Rantall’s announcement. In some ways, perhaps understandably, Kendall’s role in proceedings has been slightly overlooked. But it should not be underestimated.

The financial planning industry has been through unprecedented regulatory scrutiny and upheaval during Rantall’s tenure. Central to how it has emerged, as the putative professional association for financial planners, is down to several factors, and one of them is the relationship between its CEO and its chair.

The FPA was led by the double-act of Rantall and former chair Matthew Rowe through five critical years of negotiation, bartering, cajoling and persuading, of restructuring, and of repairing relationships and reputation with members. Their working relationship was as solid as any you’ll find between a CEO and a chair, anywhere. “Eagle One” and “Eagle Two” the pair was dubbed, so close were they.

As fundamental as strong high-level relationships are to the to stability and success of any organisation, the FPA has not always been so lucky – and that may be understating it.

In 2009 – just before Rowe became deputy chair of the FPA, and pre-dating Rantall’s appointment – the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services (PJC; chaired by Bernie Ripoll) wrote to the chair of the FPA warning against threatening one of the FPA’s own directors, after the director made a submission to the PJC’s inquiry into financial products and services in Australia.

The PJC indicated that the letter to the director may have constituted a contempt of parliament and could have been considered a criminal act. The committee requested that the letter be withdrawn unreservedly and that a proposed review of the director’s conduct be shelved, and sought an assurance that the director would “suffer no further disadvantage as a consequence of her having made a submission to the inquiry”. All of these requests were agreed to.

Neil Kendall replaced Rowe as FPA chair in a seamless transition last year, and it is easy to overlook the role that Kendall has in turn played in ensuring the orderly transition between CEOs.

In Kendall the FPA has someone who – first as a director, then as deputy chair, and now as chair – has been deeply involved in leading the association out of an era of turmoil, through a period of upheaval and into the relatively calm seas ahead.

And in De Gori it has a CEO-elect who is perhaps better grounded technically than any CEO before him – with no disrespect intended – and who has an unrivalled understanding of the legislative process from beginning to implementation.

There is continuity in both appointments. Each is well versed in the culture and the expectations of the FPA and its members.

Both men are in the right respective places at the right time to deliver for the FPA exactly what it needs in coming years. They have worked together for years. And so there is no reason to suppose that the new CEO–chair relationship won’t continue strongly for years, which is good news for the FPA, good news for its members, and good news for the continued development of a financial planning profession in Australia.

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