S. Timothy Kochis, JD, MBA, CFP®

Across more than five decades of change, Tim Kochis has repeatedly helped financial planning take its next step — strengthening how professionals are educated and assessed, reshaping how firms can grow and helping extend professional standards around the world.

As Chair of the Board of Examiners of CFP Board, Kochis led the multi-year development of the first comprehensive CFP® examination, introduced in 1991. The new exam brought financial planning disciplines together in a single assessment, helping establish a more integrated measure of professional competency. He later served as CFP Board Chair in 1995.

Kochis was equally committed to the education behind those standards. He co-founded the Personal Financial Planning Program at UC Berkeley and taught there for 18 years, preparing hundreds of future financial planning professionals and helping strengthen university-based education in a still-developing profession.

He also helped shape the evolution of financial planning practice. After leading personal financial planning at Bank of America and Deloitte, Kochis co-founded Kochis Fitz in 1991. Its 2008 merger with Quintile formed Aspiriant, an early large-scale combination of independent advisory firms that offered a new model for growth, succession and continuity.

His influence reached well beyond the United States. Kochis was a key architect in the establishment of the Financial Planning Standards Board, helping create an independent global home for CFP® certification standards. As a founding board member and Chair in 2005, he played a central role in transferring stewardship of the international CFP marks to FPSB and expanding the profession’s global reach.

The throughline in Kochis’s career is not any one title or institution, but an instinct for seeing what the profession needed next — and helping build it.

The result is a profession with stronger standards, deeper educational roots, more durable institutions and a reach far beyond the country where his work began.