The association you seldom hear about - the Alliance of Comprehensive Planners (ACP) - is now at the center of several trends in the profession—and reaching out to new members. The ACP’s training and mentoring makes it possible for career changers, tax preparers and former CFP students to rapidly build the necessary skills to profitably offer professional advice.

Its training has been modernized and made more accessible to a wider audience, and the tax-oriented planning organization with a reputation for flat fee billing is actively recruiting new members. “We’ve trained a lot of advisors over the past 30 years,” says Wesley Stien, founder of Lodestar Financial Management in Arlington, VA, who is ACP’s immediate past president. “But for a long time, our training program was in binders. The world has changed a lot since then, and we decided that we wanted to catch up.”

The ACP provides training to career changers who want to build a sustainable business, and new advisors who want a proven system to provide advice and service. The ACP model of financial planning includes seven core concepts that the community uses with clients and in their business practices. The original iteration of ACP required advisors to charge directly for their services. It's still the home of many non-AUM advisory firms.​

Originally published in Bob Veres' Inside Information in February 2026. Read full article here.
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It’s hard to remember anything comparable to Morningstar’s decision to shutter Morningstar Office and force its roughly 1,700 U.S. based advisory firm customers to move thousands of client accounts to a new portfolio management platform. 

The situation is complicated by several factors. Different advisory firms have different expiring dates on their Office contracts, making the switch urgent or not. Instead of selling Office, Morningstar negotiated an arrangement with SS&C Black Diamond where Morningstar will receive some undisclosed compensation for Office users that decide to migrate to the Black Diamond platform. Black Diamond is offering discounts to entice firms to accept Morningstar’s hoped-for handoff, but so too are a variety of other portfolio management software platforms who are competing for the business, including Advyzon.

​Originally published in Bob Veres' Inside Information on May 27, 2025. Read full article here.

Ever wonder whether the firm down the street is experimenting with how it charges clients? Bob Veres of Inside Information takes a look at the state of the profession’s revenue model via the 2022 Billing and Fee study from Advyzon, a comprehensive service and technology platform and portfolio management solution for financial advisors and investment managers. Bottom line: Nearly all firms are charging some of their clients based on something other than AUM, but nearly all are charging AUM for most of the people they work with. In addition, nearly 40% of advisors offer some form of flat-fee option.

Originally published by Inside Information on January 29, 2023. Read full article here.