Excerpt from the article:
Executives at financial firms suggest that the slippage in interest in the exam will be reversed by market changes that are raising the bar for practitioners. Jim Foley, director of advisory and business development with Savant Capital Management in Illinois, says clients are demanding more. “If you're going to go up-channel to a higher net worth client, you're going to run into more-than-average day-to-day technical issues,” he says. “In the wirehouse world, they try to provide the product. You don't need to understand how to calculate a retirement, here's the product to fulfill the need.
“I think the wirehouse world and the whole industry is evolving, because that's not going to work anymore. You have to go up-channel a little bit in your knowledge.
“If clients didn't demand it, the industry wouldn't provide it. I think a big chunk of it has come out of the market setbacks. Was there a big booming desire for financial planning in 1999? Not really. It was just, ‘Give me a basket of tech stocks and away we go.’ When people blew up, they stepped back and realized they didn't have a process, they had just been fortunate. I think advisors responded. Advisors realized that if you make it strictly about individual investment performance alone, you're going to lose your clients in bear markets.”
Jim Foley Quoted in Registered Rep Magazine 2-1-10
http://savantcapital.com