The planning profession’s largest certification correlates with good grades from clients, both in terms of important wealth management outcomes and satisfaction with their financial advisors.
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Certified financial planners draw significantly stronger scores from their customers than those using a non-CFP advisor or none at all, according to last month’s release of the results from the second year of the CFP Board’s ongoing study, which the organization describes as “the first comprehensive academic study to track and report the actual impact of holistic financial planning on clients.” The research adds to growing literature on the numeric value of quality financial advice and how to communicate that value to clients and prospective customers. The CFP Board’s study examines planning outcomes over at least a decade — a miniature and profession-focused version of the famed Harvard University study of happiness over 85 years.
At least 73% of the clients of CFPs said they have “strong trust” in their planner, but only 52% of the non-CFP advised customers said they had the same level of faith in their advisor. Nearly two-thirds of the CFP-advised clients said they were “very satisfied,” compared to 44% of those using non-CFP advisors. And CFP-advised clients surpassed their counterparts with non-certified planners by more than 20 percentage points when asked if their advisors reduce financial anxiety and motivate them toward long-term planning goals. The research could influence advisors’ professional development choices on obtaining certifications, marketing efforts with prospective clients and, perhaps most significantly, the value of full-bore planning.
To Matt Regan, the president of Richmond, Virginia-based independent advisor services and registered investment advisory firm Wealthcare, the results were compelling but “shouldn’t surprise anyone” when considering the question of whether comprehensive wealth management “is a better mousetrap.” Talking to clients about their lives, goals and risk tolerance simply yields better value to clients than talking about what stocks to pick in the course of a jargon-filled lecture, Regan said.
“A lot of this has been around for a long long time, but the reality is that we’re still moving away from the investment-only guys,” he said. “There are more of them out there than you may think.”
READ MORE: Here’s a financial advisor’s estimated value to clients
Checking the numbers
The May 2025 survey, designed by four respected planning professors and carried out by the NORC polling service from the University of Chicago and its AmeriSpeak panel, spanned 4,567 participants, with 3,357 who were part of last year’s sample. Each of them had annual incomes of at least $50,000 and $30,000 worth of investable assets, and 38% of the group said they had hired a financial planner. Other key takeaways from the survey included:
When asked if they felt better off than peers financially, 54% of the CFP-advised participants said “yes,” compared to only 34% with a non-CFP advisor.Larger shares of CFP-advised clients described their planner as “very detailed” about the psychology of financial planning, as well as tax, retirement, estates, risk management and insurance and investments.With a difference of a positive 40 points in “net promoter score” — nearly double that of non-CFP advised customers at a positive 22 points — the CFP-advised clients were much more likely to promote their planner to others.When asked which factors were “very important” to their decision about hiring a financial planner, “recommended by family/friend” drew the largest portion of the sample at 54%, followed by “clear pricing” (52%), “strong designations/education” (35%), “specialized” (33%), “recommended by professional” (29%) and “good location” (24%).When queried about the statement, “I am familiar with how financial professionals are paid,” 85% of the CFP-advised customers said they were “very” or “extremely” familiar, compared to 63% of all advised clients and 39% of non-advised clients.Clients of CFPs were more likely to have sufficient income for three months in an emergency situation, a will and a higher degree of financial security if they were to die unexpectedly or become unable to work.CFP-advised customers also reported stronger confidence in reaching their financial goals, living comfortably, avoiding family money conflicts and being satisfied with the state of their finances.
READ MORE: Advisors with CIMA, CPWA and RMA marks have more income and AUM
Lingering research questions and practical implications
The research comes with some challenges, according to a virtual presentation earlier this month by two of the academics leading the study: J. Michael Collins, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is the Fetzer Family Chair in Consumer and Personal Finance in the School of Human Ecology; and Sonya Lutter, the director of financial health and wellness at Texas Tech University School of Financial Planning.
Clients of CFPs likely have more wealth and education in general, Collins said, agreeing with some of the commentary from attendees at the webinar. But the researchers face some built-in shortcomings simply based on the nature of the study.
“We’re not a pharmaceutical company,” Collins said. “We can’t go out and find a random sample of people to randomly assign to working with a financial planner or a CFP. I don’t even know what the placebo would be. In this case, if you have a good idea for what the control group would be for a study, please let me know.”
Regardless, the researchers are uncovering “persistent differences” among clients who work with CFPs and those who don’t, even when they “control for factors like income and assets and age and all kinds of other things,” he noted. They’re also using a statistical analysis method known as “matching” to line up responses among people with similar ages, assets, household sizes and states. Usually, that reduces the disparities between groups.
“So does this prove that working with a financial advisor makes people better off? Certainly I wouldn’t go that far, but this is a pretty robust test,” Collins said. “It gives us a little more confidence in the findings that we’re seeing. And the other important thing is that, when we do the matching, the results in terms of the differences between the two groups get larger and not smaller. So we’re not conditioning away the factors that might be involved. We’re actually making our results even stronger.”
In her remarks, Lutter pointed to the differences in net promoter scores and understanding of fees, as well as the importance of client referrals and price transparency to customers, as some of the most notable conclusions so far. Only 10% of the respondents said an ad had either spurred them to hire an advisor or might lead them to do so, she noted.
In contrast, aiding prospective clients’ grasp of the fees represents a “huge opportunity to increase the price transparency here, and that, in and of itself, could be enough to help them understand that this is a value-add for them,” she said. “Maybe they have some idea that it’s even more expensive than they can afford, which may not be reality.”
Even the study’s process of assessing outcomes quantitatively and qualitatively itself could lead to beneficial conversations for clients and advisors alike, according to Lutter. The team plans to release the survey questions from the study.
“Ideally your [customer relationship management] or other planning software is already capturing elements of wellness, and maybe you identified some of those things that you hadn’t previously thought of as holistic financial wellness,” she said. “But if you’re not capturing that data already, perhaps start asking some questions about their feelings towards money, or maybe prior experiences with money or various life events. And then, at some point, maybe introducing them to the full financial wellness assessment could be a really big deal in measuring people’s change over time and really highlighting that value of financial planning.”
