Minimum educational entry standards, an exam, uniform continuing professional development (CPD) requirements and a single code of ethics are all more or less indispensable as the building blocks of a profession.

But what’s the point of creating a gold-plated professional structure for financial planning if nobody uses it? This is one of the questions raised during the Financial Planning Association’s 2017 National Roadshow, which rolls into Sydney this afternoon.

It’s easy to understand why the industry’s focus is squarely on new educational, professional and ethical standards that will come into force in stages between 2019 and 2024. There’s a lot to do and a lot that financial planners will be asked to measure up to.

But it’s difficult to see the whole picture if you’re looking at only half a dozen pieces of a much larger puzzle. Professional standards are fundamental, but laying a strong foundation will count for nothing if the public doesn’t know what’s happening, and if it does not lead to a greater take-up of planners’ services in the future.

Various bodies, including the FPA, are busily targeting consumers to extol the virtues of financial planning, yet the take-up continues to stagnate or even fall. FPA chief executive Dante De Gori told the Roadshow that the number of individuals seeking financial planning services has declined from 2.7 million to 2.4 million.

He says there are more than 1 million people who say they need the services of a financial planner but they’re just not budging.

Getting more people to seek advice can sound like a self-serving aim – and there’s obviously an element of self-interest in it – so the benefits of financial planning need to be framed as a wider, public-interest issue. While everyone talks about the best-interests duty contained in legislation, there’s much less said about a professional’s public-interest duty.

The first question any profession, including financial planning, needs to answer clearly is: What public interest does it serve?

If the answer is couched in terms of benefits to individual clients, practitioners or the industry, there’s no need for a financial planning profession to exist at all, and we can all pack up and go home now.

The time, effort and expense of creating and enforcing professional, education and ethical standards is pointless if it doesn’t serve the public interest first and everything else after that. De Gori hasn’t said as much (yet), but he has said clearly that the professional, educational and ethical standards coming down the pipeline are not an end in themselves, but merely a means to end.

In trying to answer this question, let’s remember that the public interest isn’t always the same thing as what interests the public, and it’s not even necessarily the same as the best interests of an individual client.

A hallmark of a profession is that it places the public interest above all else. This creates challenges, and professions have to grapple with them all the time – it’s not supposed to be easy. Think about the use of antibiotics for a moment. It may clearly be in an individual patient’s best interest to be prescribed antibiotics, but the over-prescription of antibiotics is said to be making bacteria resistant. This is regarded as a threat to public health. Which should take precedence? What is a professional medical practitioner to do?

A public-interest definition for financial planning might have something to do with relieving the pressure on the public purse to fund retirement incomes or enabling the broader community to achieve financial security and live with dignity in retirement – issues along those lines. Other definitions might be equally appropriate but, regardless, a profession need to address the public interest before they address the interests of individual clients and practitioners.

That’s the challenge. Minimum standards, enforcement and monitoring are all well and good, and can be addressed through legislation, co-regulation, self-regulation or some combination.

But creating something that serves the public interest, and which therefore resonates with the public and gains acceptance as a genuine profession, is a slightly different issue. That’s what De Gori is hinting at. It requires every single practitioner to fulfil his or her individual obligations, while at the same time stepping outside the interests of themselves, their business or employer, their licensee – even their industry – to fully appreciate the bigger picture.

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