Hello everyone. I am Daphne Jordan. I am chair of the National Board and I am so pleased to welcome each of you here today to today's member update as we take a look at what's happening in our fine Association and as we take a look ahead. We have a few housekeeping notes. All of the participants, you will be muted during this briefing. You can use the Q&A function to submit any questions that you have. And as we're looking at the list of attendees, we're seeing that more people are filing in. Welcome to all the new people who are joining us today. So let's take a look at today's agenda. We have a lot of meaty items for you today. We're going to hear updates on several areas as you can see laid out here. We will also let you know what's happening in our current strategic drivers of diversity, equity, and inclusion on advocacy of public policy and how we're making sure that we are visible in a fee-only format. And of course we'll also talk about professional excellence because this we want to be the premier resource for you as a planner in this area. And we will take time to hear about the Napa Foundation and we wish to have some time for any questions that might bubble up to you as we're going through everything today. We have a great group of excellent presenters that are going to share information with you today along with myself, Deva Panambour, the Secretary-Treasurer will join us. We have our Membership Committee Chair, Kelsey. We're also pleased to have Dan Danford, our Public Policy Committee Chair, telling us some up-to-date information. We have some professionals from Vox Media, Kayla and Allison, who will join us to tell us what's happening in those areas. And rounding up our group, we have Zach, who will tell us about the professional excellence area and our new Chief Executive Officer, Catherine Dutomo. So I am now going to turn this over to Deva Panambour, and he is our Secretary-Treasurer and he is going to provide an update on finances for all of us. Thank you, Daphne. Hello, everybody. It is my pleasure to give you an update on NAPFA's financial performance. Now, before I dive into the numbers that you see on the slide, as you know, NAPFA's fiscal year starts on September 1 of each year and ends the next year on August 31. Before the start of every fiscal year, the NAPFA staff, the Finance Committee and the board, NAPFA board, creates, discusses and approves a budget for the upcoming year. And after the end of the fiscal year, the actual performance is compared to the budget. So for the fiscal year ending August 31, 2023, and that's the numbers you see on the slide, total revenues was about $4.3 million, which was 103% of the annual budgeted revenue of about $4.18 million. Now, this number compares to the prior year actual number of $3.2 million. Total expenses for 2023 were $4.265 million, which was also 103% of what we had budgeted, of about $4.159 million. And 2023 expenses compares to last year when expenses were $3.837 million. The surplus, the net income for 2023 was $32,468. That was about 39% more than what we had budgeted for the year of $23,000. Now, as you know, NAPFA also maintains its reserve in an investment account. And for 2023, the investment income from that account was about $240,000. Now, moving on to the balance sheet, NAPFA ended the quarter and the year with $4.573 million in assets and $1.87 million in liabilities, resulting in a net asset of $2.7 million. And this compares to the prior year balance of about $2.67 million. And with that, I will pass it on to Kelsey Brennan, who's going to give you an update on membership. Thanks, Deva. Hi, guys. My name is Kelsey Brennan, and I will dive into our membership update. So just looking at the membership goals and statistics for the current physical year, our goal is to ultimately get to a total membership count of, you know, roughly 4,778 total members. And that's a pretty high total members, and we aim to get there through a combination of new members and retaining the members that we already have. So year to date, as of October, we are already meeting our retention goal. So our retention goal for the year is 90%, and we are currently at 98.9% retention. And we have 75 new members year to date. And just for reference, last year, our goal was to grow 3.3%. And we've already grown 3% year to date, just a few months into the new physical year. So that is great. And moving on to just talking about the sources of where our new members come from. So new NAPFA members come from a few different sources, about half of our new members are from new to NAPFA firms. So a lot of people in that category are people that have heard about NAPFA through, you know, word of mouth, or they've attended a conference or come to a local group. And so they make up about half, and then the other half of our new members come from a combination of our XY partnership, about 25% from there, and then 25% from members at existing firms. And then just looking ahead to 2024, and what we'll be kind of focusing on in this new year, you know, continuing to create a member experience that drives our high retention rates, focusing on our new CFP members. So NAPFA offers one year free membership to CFP members, and the conversion rate for those members is really high, meaning that typically they stay NAPFA members even after their first free year ends. Also focusing on adding younger employees at existing NAPFA firms and partnering with our, you know, our fostering our partnerships with XYPN, CFP board, Quad A and Onyx to drive new membership. And then I just quickly wanted to touch on some of our member, different member experience programs that we have. So mixed groups, local groups, conversation circles, mixed groups are, you know, we have a couple different mixed groups, and there's always new ones that are being created. If you're interested in creating one, you can definitely reach out to, you know, someone at NAPFA, and we will work with you on creating a mixed group. Those tend to be topically focused, you know, usually a small group that meets once a month on a certain topic. Local groups are more designed for geographical, you know, people in your area meeting up with them. And then we have conversation circles, which are held throughout the month on a variety of topics. And with that, I will pass it back to Daphne for our DEI initiatives update. Thank you so much. So let's take a look at NAPFA's diversity, equity and inclusion work. So this is a strategic initiative for NAPFA, and it encompasses several areas. So the several areas include gender, race, ethnicity, accessibility, and age. So there is an overall goal for NAPFA and the D&I initiative to reach all areas of diversity. When it comes to Genesis and Women's Initiative and the D&I initiative, those are currently communities of interest specifically in this area. So we see D&I as the business of the entire association. There are some current programming that's happening. For example, perhaps in your inbox, you have seen a welcoming workplace. This is a set of six case studies that will tell you how various firms across the country are handling and tackling in a successful way this issue. There's also conversation circles that are facilitated, webinar programs, and when you're at conferences, there will be sessions available. Also, there's mentor programs that you can get involved with the D&I initiative and the Women's Initiative. They also offer scholarships that we can tell you more about if you have questions about that. And then there's the D&I training and certificate program. This is an award winning program. It was created by financial advisors for financial advisors. It happens twice each fiscal year. There's a hybrid format that happens in the spring and an all virtual format that happens in the fall. It includes four on demand modules that encompasses people, culture, inclusion, and hiring practice. And so far, we've had 109 participants, as you can see here, who've been through the program, and they have all had great things to say about it. This can also be offered at a firm level if your firm is interested in this. If you're wondering how you can participate, think about and we'll look at the next slide here. You can participate in D&I by joining a Facebook group, Genesis, the Women's Initiative, and also the D&I initiative. They all have Facebook groups that you can join. You can attend one of the upcoming webinars and conversation circles. You can actually take the certificate program or send one of your teammates or as we've already said, bring it into your firm. You can also volunteer to participate on a committee. I'm now going to pass the baton to Dan and he's going to tell us what is happening in the advocacy area. Thank you, Daphne. We have a public policy advocacy group that meets monthly. And we work with our consultant, Michael Watkins, who has a law firm in Chicago that studies all things Washington, DC and statewide. And he prepares a detailed memo for us each month kind of updating the various things we pay attention to. But I kind of wanted to start out just by touching the big policy issues. I think there's three or four, maybe on the next slide. See if that comes up. Public policy. Okay, here's the policy as yet. So the number one is that we stand for a full fiduciary standard of care in the industry. We're going to talk about that again in a minute. Number two is we want proper investment advisor oversight. As you know, our oversight is largely with the SEC on a federal level. But some of the RIAs and some NAPFA members are registered with their states. And so we also are interested in how the states review and oversight on the various members of NAPFA and in the industry, not just among us. And then the three is the recognition and regulation of financial planning, which probably requires a lot of care in some areas like, you know, the FPA have made some of that their primary goal going forward. But we continue to be able to monitor all that and participate in any way we can that moves the financial planning profession forward. Now, there are, I think on the next slide, a number of other issues that I mean, these are the guiding lights. But the next slide looks at some of the individual things that we watch on an ongoing basis. So I'm not going to touch on all of them because it'd take too long. And there isn't a lot of interesting information or new information on some of these. But there's some others that I want to talk about in a little more detail. So obviously, modernizing regulatory review, very necessary, were for anything that brings it out of the industrial age into today, I guess. So we're supportive of anything that the SEC or the states do, or any other regulatory body that affects us. And we're going to talk about that in just a second. Bank failures, not much more there. Retirement security that passed earlier this year, primarily involved with things like updating the RMD schedules for IRAs and retirement plans, the amount of catch up provisions, the amount of limits that people can put into the plans that has already passed. We really don't have any big issues with any of that. But we are watching it in case you know, there's something pop up that would be of a big effect on our people. Advisor fee deductibility, you know, obviously, the fees that people used to pay to their advisors were deductible on their tax return, they are no longer. And we would like for that to go back because we think it would be good for consumers in general. If it happens, it's probably going to be something that's attached to another bill. So they're in a lot of lobbying, a little effort that we need to do right now, what what may happen is when the omnibus bill goes through at the end of the year or something like that, you know, one of our allies or advocates or one of our friends that's in the House or the Senate may attach that on and if it does, then we'll offer whatever support we can to help get get through. Obviously, we'd like it to happen. But there's not a whole lot that we need to do right now. Fiduciary standard of care, that's a big thing for us. We would like to see a fiduciary standard of care, a full fiduciary standard of care in the marketplace. SEC several years back passed Reg BI. It fell somewhat short of what we'd like to see, but was probably better than what was out there before. The interesting thing, and I'm going to touch on that in just a second, but what we're following now is that they are starting to enforce those. You're starting to see agency actions against advisors that don't meet certain requirements. How those court cases and how those things unfold is really important. It's something that we watch. Of more interest right now is the new Department of Labor rule that was recently showcased, I guess, by the White House. They proposed it. This has been something going on for four or five years, and they talked for a long time about introducing the updated version, but they just now did that in the last 30 days or so. I'm not going to go through all of it, but it's really important. There's three or four things that it tries to do. Number one is it tries to create a federal framework across all the marketplace for advice and products in the ERISA space. We're talking about things that are provided through IRA accounts, things that are provided through 401k plans, basically all across ERISA. That's the first thing. The second thing is they want to close some gaps that are out there in the securities regulation area. This would be the area where brokers differ from advisors. There are things that they are allowed to do right now that we aren't allowed to do because we're full fiduciaries. Same with the insurance industry. There are a lot of insurance products that are sold to IRAs that are exempted from a fiduciary standard, and this piece from the DOL tries to fold that in. Then the last thing, the fourth point that they're trying to do is to address specific assets or investment types that maybe were not part of the package in the past. We'll see how that all unfolds. The interesting thing is, as you might guess, all of us have seen, if you've been working in this space for a while, you've seen some pretty awful products that have been sold to people in their IRAs and retirement accounts. It's just part of the marketplace. I think particularly of some annuity products that I've seen, not all, but some that are just really bad products. Well, you can understand how strongly the insurance industry feels about maintaining those exemptions and not being folded into the fiduciary standard like we are. That's a huge thing. Same in the brokerage business in some ways. They don't necessarily want all their brokers held to a full fiduciary standard. The important takeaway from this is, there's a lot of opposition out there to the new DOA rule as it's been proposed. They are collecting comments from everybody in the industry. They are holding hearings, and NAPFA hopes to have a couple of people appear at the hearing so that we can present the NAPFA side of this about how we think the fiduciary standard is good and all that kind of thing. This is very much the red hot topic of the moment for us right now. This is happening today. The interesting thing to me about this is NAPFA members already meet the fiduciary requirement. These changes aren't going to affect us and how we operate in our practices, but what it will do is change the marketplace. No matter how this comes out, even if they water down some of the provisions and stuff, it brings people in that have not been there in the past. How this finally goes through is going to be enormously important in the marketplace in general and for consumers in addition to that. We've always taken a position that we're for whatever is best for consumers. Really red hot topic right now. We are blazing away on this as we go forward because this is something that needs to be addressed right now. The other thing that this plays into kind of an interesting time where for the first several years of the Biden administration, there wasn't a lot being done on a legislative agenda or through the regulatory issues. Part of that is because there are still government slots that have not been filled at this point. They can't get the people through the Senate and get them appointed and that kind of thing. After a couple of years of kind of standby as we watch what's going on, now all of a sudden it's roaring forward. We've got people working really, really hard. Just two more things I want to touch on. One is the SEC investment advisor oversight. This is something we watch real carefully. One of the things we talked about was the Reg B.I. enforcement, the things they're starting to do there now and how we watch that to see how it might affect our members. The second is they proposed a new custody and safeguarding rule in the last couple of months that might put some pretty heavy restrictions on how we hold assets, especially nontraditional assets. Again, the comment period is ongoing on that, so we don't know exactly what's going to happen, but if we need to comment on it, we will comment on it. We're waiting to see what happens there. The second is that they also proposed what they call an oversight of outsourcing rule. What this basically did was impose on advisors a real need to document the people they're using through their practice for their clients. If you use CRM, perhaps, you would have to have documentation on your site about who owns the CRM company, how often they update the materials, how much those people get access to your clients. Think of that times every single vendor that you use. It's a huge issue. This proposed outsourcing rule ran 220 pages. Now, the interesting thing is since it was proposed, there was a lot of outcry at first. Things have quieted down. I would say it's probably something that if they go through with it, we will probably want to comment on it and say this would be onerous, especially for our smaller practices, but we aren't quite to that point yet, so it's just something that we're watching. These are the kinds of things that we watch on an ongoing basis. Last little thing I'll touch on. We belong to a group of other professional organizations that follow the area of occupational licensing. Now, this is one of those things that is on a state-by-state basis, so you probably don't think a lot about it in general, but it's things like your state probably has rules and regulations over what a barber needs to do to become a barber and a beauty shop and just go dentist, doctors, everything, that kind of thing. They also would have state rules about who could use the CFP designation or who could say that they are a NAPFA registered advisor. None of that is a problem for us right now on a state-by-state basis, but there have been some issues in the past where some of the states now are particularly interested in changing the occupational licensing rules because people who are convicted of felonies aren't allowed to take some of those practice exams, those kinds of things that people would need in certain areas. So, every once in a while, some legislator will propose something that says, well, we're no longer going to allow a professional organization to use somebody's past criminal status as a barrier to their entry in those areas. Not saying that's going to happen, but it's something we watch with this group of 100 other professional licensing things so that if somebody proposes something that would be in opposition to our professional rules and regulations that we could protest that properly. It's a great organization, doesn't require a lot of input from us, but we watch it all the time and it is something that affects all of us in our practices, especially, I mean, no matter what state you're in, they have rules about this and if they alter those rules, it might be good, but it might not be good and so it's something we want to watch. So, that's a lot of information, maybe more information than you wanted to know, but it's because we're following a lot of things and we're very active in trying to move us forward in the way that we want to go and to avoid problems where there aren't problems now. So, I'm not going to, I'm going to pass this along to somebody else, but we will have an opportunity for questions and answers later. So, if you've got them, you can submit them through the list and I'll try to answer it if I can. I'm going to hand off now to Kayla and Allison and they're going to talk a little bit about communications. Hey there. Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Allison. I'm part of the team that supports NAPFA's consumer advocacy communications and we've been a communications partner to you guys since 2015. So, again, great to be here. I also have Kayla on the phone who leads a few of our work streams that are listed here and we'll be walking you through some of our top highlights over the past year and how we've communicated our consumer advocacy work to our key audiences of consumers, personal finance reporters, and other advisors and influencers in this space. So, you can move on to the next slide and I'll kick it over to Kayla. Thanks, Allison. Hi, everyone. So, yeah, a little bit about the Advisory Bureau. So, this was launched back in December of 2022. So, we've been at this for about a year now. All NAPFA registered financial advisors were invited to sign up for the Bureau to receive requests from journalists about financial topics. Now, we have around 260 registered financial advisors who are regularly offering insights across a variety of financial topics like retirement, investments, education, and etc. We've also conducted a few media training sessions with these Bureau members to provide them with tips and tricks for working with the media. This program has seen repeat interest from some notable outlets like MarketWatch, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and many more as you can see here on the slide. Kind of the, you know, the goal of this Bureau is fostering a working level of familiarity and trust with reporters and positioning NAPFA as a thought leader in financial planning. So, many of you may have seen my name come through the media outreach inbox that's listed here. We get a lot of repeat interest from specific reporters who now do trust the Advisory Bureau as, you know, experts in, you know, lending insight to the stories they're writing. So, if anyone on this call is interested in joining the Bureau, we've got the email address listed here. You know, please reach out and we can get you set up and I'll pass it back to Alice. Great. Thanks, Kayla. We want to give you guys a little background on two great communications initiatives we did this year. One was our annual consumer survey. So, we conducted this survey on financial wellness and how consumers are feeling about their finances and how it may affect their jobs. This was back in September 2022. And then, just a few months after that, we released a press release and an infographic focused on how Americans are looking to employers for these financial wellness benefits. So, really great insights, especially for personal finance reporters. We had amazing reach and this story and the survey data resonated with a lot of folks. We reached an audience of almost 230 million through our release alone. We also received great coverage, especially in business media. We actually earned 58 articles that were published, including at CPA Practice Advisor, Financial Advisor, LA Business Journal, yes, LA Business Journal, MarketWatch, and Think Advisor, which are top publications for us. And we also had a lot of just basic reporter interest and interviews with Barron's, MarketWatch, Forbes, and Financial Planning. So, really great outcomes from this annual consumer survey. And moving on to the next slide, I wanted to hit on a little bit on the MAT release we did. So, for those who are unfamiliar, a MAT release is a sponsored placement. However, it feels and looks very editorial, if you will. So, what we did here was we published a piece that was about the four qualities of an excellent financial advisor. And what was great about this is we were able to weave in a lot of our consumer survey findings here and link out to our Find an Advisor tool, which is always a priority for us here. And this article was selected by editors across the country at over, let's see here, it reached an audience of over 160 million and over a thousand placements. And what's really great too about this is we reached top markets. So, we received placements in some of the top DMAs. So, just the top cities that have the largest media markets and with really great strong performance in the Midwest as well. And Kayla, I'll kick it to you to talk about our ads. Thanks. Yeah. So, we had revamped our campaign strategy when it comes to ads this year to target 29 of the lowest volume conversion states and picked one of the most saturated conversion states, which is Texas, to run a few types of different messaging strategies. Our goal with the ads, you can kind of see it here on the slide, is to draw visitors to the website and encourage them to use the Find An Advisor tool. So we had ads show up in 96,718 Google searches related to financial planning, and those ads drove 2,540 searches via the Find An Advisor tool. So our click-through rate continually surpassed the financial services industry average, which the average is 2.6%. Our campaign had a cumulative click-through rate of 5.71%, and then on our conversion rate for the campaign came in at 46%, and the industry standard, or the industry average, is 5.1%. So it's clear that our audience is actively seeking this content on Google. This is the perfect opportunity for us to meet them with the exact information that they need. It's just an extremely effective way to get those looking for a financial advisor through to NAPFA's tool. So that's kind of all that we have on the outreach side of things. I'm gonna pass it over to Zach for the professional excellence update. Great, thanks, Kayla and Allison. Hey, everyone, my name's Zach Hubbard. I am the chair of the Professional Development Education Committee. So I'll give you just a quick update on what's happening educationally in NAPFA. So first thing first, let's start off with everyone's favorite topic, continuing education, right? So NAPFA's CE policy, look, it's an important part of our commitment to maintaining the highest competency standards in the profession. So current cycle ends December 31st. So if you haven't done those CEs, make sure that you're getting them done. NAPFA headquarters has been sending reminder emails. So please don't ignore those. Don't send them to your junk email. Make sure you are reading those and getting those CEs done. Reminder, we do have one month left in that CE cycle. So if you still got CEs left to do, make sure that you're getting those done. We go to that next slide. NAPFA about a year and a half ago launched the Learning Center. You can access the Learning Center and actually you can track your CE progress and identify how many CEs you have left to complete in that Learning Center. So again, don't ignore those emails that are coming from NAPFA headquarters. You can find all that CE information in Learning Center. You can also self-report any CEs that you have done in that Learning Center as well. If it's the first time that you're hearing about the Learning Center, you can do a lot more than just track and report CEs. You can also really create your personal education hub within that Learning Center. So you can access upcoming events, on-demand education. It's a really great way to fulfill all those CE requirements that you have and make sure that you're checking those CE boxes over time. There are also a number of tutorial videos available to help guide you through that learning environment. You can go to education at NAPFA.org, send that email address to get started. NAPFA also partners with a variety of industry experts to offer some high quality and discounted educational offerings. AARP online training helps financial advisors identify and stop suspected financial exploitation of older clients. And also in 2023, we partnered with Sonya Letters and Light, and Light bridges the gap between financial planning and mental health, really important. Mix of topics there for folks. They have courses for consumers like Love and Money for Couples, wanting to enhance their relationship and courses for professionals like Managing Client Conflict for Financial Planners, wanting to expand their skillset. Herbers & Company also helps fast track leadership, human capital, marketing, sales, and client communication skills of financial advisors across the globe. So number of valuable partnerships there. Go to the next slide. We'll also talk about a couple more. So the Medicare Rights Center is the country's largest independent source of Medicare information and advice. And they offer Medicare Interactive Pro. So that's the course that we've partnered with them to offer. So if you want to learn more about Medicare to better serve your clients, and if you need a reliable and convenient education source, Medicare Interactive Pro is there for you. And then we also partnered with the National Association of Registered Social Security Analysts. That's NARSA.org. They are the nation's leading membership organization for financial professionals and advisors engaged in social security advisory. So if you want to learn more about social security to better serve your clients, help them with those complex social security decisions that they need to make, those ultra important decisions when it comes to their retirement, you can use that our SSA e-learning program for you to learn more about how to become an expert in that social security advice. Go to the next slide. Netflix Playbooks webinar series takes a deep dive into marketing and other practice management topics. So this is a series of three unique topics and three webinars bringing theory to practice. So we're wrapping our 2023 webinar series actually tomorrow with three to three. However, all are available on that learning center I talked about on demand. So you can access them anytime through that e-learning center. 2024 Playbook series is gonna kick off in February with series number one on AI and advisors. It's gonna talk about what is AI, of course, how to employ AI in your practice and how you can make sure that you're using AI in a compliant and secure way with regards to cybersecurity implications for your clients and for your practice. So save the date. It's gonna be sent out earlier next month. So make sure that you're marking your calendars for those exciting educational opportunities. Now, as you know, 2020 was kind of a year that flipped the script on national conferences, right? It kind of turned us on our head. So we had to do virtual conferences to really continue to provide that access to high quality content for members. But we were excited to get back to in-person events in fall of 2021. We did anticipate it taking a while to get registration back up to speed. Many organizations continue to struggle to match their pre-COVID numbers for attendance, but we're excited to share that NAFTA has officially exceeded our pre-COVID attendance numbers in 2023. So cheers to everybody, NAFTA staff and members who put those together. Both spring and fall conferences outperformed the fall of 2019 numbers. So really great stuff. Glad to see so many folks getting back together for those conferences and being in-person for those. It's a great, great experience. So speaking of conferences, if we go to the next slide, let's keep that momentum up. 2024 is gonna be another great year of events. So the Large Firm Forum, that's taking place February 19th to the 21st in Scottsdale, Arizona. That's an exclusive event for large firm leaders and their next gen leaders. Topics will include things like cybersecurity, hiring and retaining talent and more. So registration is actually open now. So if you are one of those large firm leaders or next gen leaders that want to attend with one of your partners or managing partners, you can go to that website to learn more about whether or not you qualify and also to register to attend. Our 2024 National Conferences, those are gonna be held in Fort Worth, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee. Those committees are already hard at work on the spring program for 2024. So keep an eye out for registration. That should be coming out in early February market calendars. Make sure that you're taking advantage of that one week early birth special pricing. Make sure that you're planning to attend one of those conferences. I have no doubt they're gonna be really great experiences. 2025, the Large Firm Forum is gonna be headed to Amelia Island, Florida. And the National Conferences will be in Phoenix, Arizona and Washington, DC. So lots of exciting things happening in the professional development and education. A lot of additional new opportunities on the horizon. Excited to share all these updates with you and look forward to all the new things that we're working on this year. With that, I'm gonna turn it back over to Catherine for an update on the NAPFA Foundation. Thank you, Zach. And thank you to all of our panelists. I appreciate you joining us today to help share with our members all of the work you're doing on their behalf. We have so much going on and I'm really excited to share it with our members. I wanna share with you a little bit of an update about the NAPFA Foundation. The NAPFA Foundation has been very busy. As you know, it has been rebranded this year as the NAPFA Foundation. The mission is transforming lives by expanding access to fee-only financial planning. There's some exciting programs that the foundation is working on. They are building homes for heroes, which is an exclusive CFP partner advising disabled veterans. They're supported by the Foundation for Financial Planning. And if you wanna learn more about any of these programs, you can contact the NAPFA Foundation or visit our website, which has more about all of these programs. Another great program is Advisors Give Back, which is a partnership that connects consumers with pro bono financial planning. College Affordability Project is helping families understand the cost of college and connecting families with tools to save money on the cost of college. And the foundation is also supporting several scholarships for students to attend conferences and advisors working towards their CFP certification. So I encourage you to learn more about those initiatives and how you can get involved. We also, through the foundation, offer some exclusive benefits for NAPFA members. There are several free educational opportunities, webinars and e-learning that's exclusive to members. There are free resources for you and your clients. There's college money report access that gives your clients a leg up on selecting the best colleges. I am a parent in the middle of helping a student apply for colleges. So I can tell you there's a lot of clients who are probably eager to see this. And you can also earn free CE credit hours, up to four CE credit hours each cycle for volunteering for one of the foundation's programs. Great way to not only give back, but to earn CE. So again, you can visit our website to learn more about the NAPFA Foundation. And I encourage you to do that. Now, I would like to open it up to our Q&A. If you have questions for any of our panelists, we'd love to talk to you about that. You can enter your questions in the Q&A chat box on your screen. So, so far during our presentation today, we did have a few questions that came in and they've already been appropriately addressed. As Catherine mentioned, if you have additional questions, please feel free to take the time to put something in Q&A. We did receive a question prior about the changes to the definition of fee only and the acceptance of members who have trailing commissions. So we will, while we're waiting to see if there's additional questions that come in, we'll just go ahead and address that. So let me just start with background on this, just to make sure we're on the same page. This is all related to standard on the CFP side, standard 8.12 of the code of standards for the CFP board. So in November of last year, so November of 2022, the CFP board approached our compensation committee to inform them that they were going to update the language when it comes to those receiving trailing commissions and holding out a fee only. Our compensation committee had a robust discussion about this. Then it was brought to the board of directors where we also had a robust conversation about it as well. As you know, we've historically excluded members who have trailing commissions. So there has been this change where someone who has trailing commissions, if they're able to go through three steps can become a NAPA member. However, we're more stringent than the CFP board with our definition. Those three steps would be that you have to try to transfer or assign your trailing commissions to a person or entity that's not a related party. Step two would be that you would request that the commissions stop. The third is that you would give your commissions to a 501c3 and then you would sign it at a station yearly that this has occurred. As I stated, NAPA is more stringent on this because we have added that it has to be de minimis and we defined de minimis as $2,500 or less. And so that's a little bit of background there. And if we discover that someone is not following those rules then they will no longer be a NAPA member and they would be reported to the CFP board and everything. No financial advisors who actively sell insurance would be eligible to be a NAPA member. I would like to also say that with this question, it was also said that there wasn't follow-up or opportunity for broader conversation. So as a board, we'll be more aware of when to do listening sessions and offer those opportunities for such broader conversations. So thank you for bringing that to our attention. As board members, we are members and we care deeply about the association. We all stand on this bridge together and we're not going to do things to burn the bridge. During our robust conversations, we also came to the conclusion that it would be confusing for consumers to have different definitions of what BMLE is out there in the marketplace. The last update I'll share about this for now is that up to date, no prospective members have applied to join NAPA, according to all of these different rules. So I just wanted to share that with you. All right, so I'm going to go to the Q&A box and see if there's any questions for any of our panelists. As Catherine said, we deeply appreciate each of you as experts taking the time to join us today. And I am just pausing a second. And I think, so there is a question about, okay, hold on a second. I'm just kind of catching up and reading into everything. Okay. So with all of this, we will make sure that we will continue to respond in everything. And as I said, we have decided that we are being in alignment with the CFP board, not to lower our standard because we do not want to do that, but to make sure that there is a consistent definition for consumers of what fee only is. And as stated, we were more stringent with our definitions of everything. So I want to thank everyone once again for their time. And I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving and we look forward to seeing everyone's faces again soon. Thank you.

Daphne Jordan

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