Are you a wealth advisor trying to enter or develop your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This shopper phase consists of enterprise homeowners, executives, inventive professionals, and next-gen heirs with a internet price of $5 million or extra.
These potential purchasers characterize a various group with distinctive challenges and life objectives far past asset accumulation. To draw and retain HNW purchasers, you’ll want superior technical experience and nuanced abilities in individuals and household dynamics administration.
How will you get or fine-tune these abilities? Incomes the Licensed Personal Wealth Advisor® (CPWA®) certification from the Investments & Wealth Institute (IWI) is one approach to accomplish this aim. However is it definitely worth the time, effort, and cash you’ll dedicate to the method?
That will help you make your determination, let’s overview what getting a CPWA certification includes and the way it may benefit wealth advisors who want to serve HNW purchasers.
What Is a CPWA Certification?
The CPWA certification program includes a novel, multidisciplinary strategy to addressing the monetary wants of HNW purchasers. Candidates to this system can select between two enrollment choices:
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A 6-month on-line program together with a 1-week, in-person class at a prime enterprise faculty
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A 12-month online-only program
The conditions are:
Lastly, it’s essential to go a four-hour remaining examination protecting 135 questions.
What Are the High Causes to Take into account the CPWA?
The first advantages cited by many advisors holding this certification are:
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Aggressive differentiation within the crowded HNW market
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Extra confidence in working with ultrawealthy purchasers
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Superior information particular to fixing complicated planning challenges
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Potential for greater compensation and profession development
And, current information tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient approach to develop your apply. In response to Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the most important common shopper dimension within the trade:
What Will You Be taught?
The CPWA program’s curriculum is designed to provide the idea and sensible methods you’ll must serve HNW purchasers—and to go the required certification examination. The 11 core subjects are damaged down into the next 4 classes:
1. Wealth administration. Understanding the large image is important to optimizing planning for the ultrawealthy. This phase will allow you to analyze and suggest tax-efficient options and discover ways to construct and handle portfolios that meet complicated HNW objectives.
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Tax planning. This deep dive into HNW-specific taxation will information you in speaking about methods with purchasers, simplify planning, and allow you to work successfully with purchasers’ tax attorneys.
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Portfolio administration. This phase will elevate your skills to harmonize wealth-building methods, threat administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with purchasers’ assets and objectives.
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Threat administration and asset safety. You’ll study to judge acceptable insurance coverage and asset methods to guard purchasers via life occasions together with marriage, divorce, and loss of life.
The [CPWA program] content material was incredible and considerably elevated my capability so as to add worth to my goal market ($1 million–$5 million investable, primarily company VP-level individuals).”
Justin Hutt, CooperDavis Monetary Group,with Commonwealth since 2017
2. Human dynamics. Working with any shopper phase requires robust abilities in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to boost your sport when serving the extremely prosperous.
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Ethics. Studying to establish and classify moral and regulatory points throughout the wealth administration spectrum will mean you can work confidently with a complicated shopper base.
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Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intervene with a shopper’s capability to make sound choices. By studying the best way to establish biases, you’ll be higher outfitted to right or complement these tendencies.
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Household dynamics. Tailoring methods for household organizations, trusts, and enterprise entities will depend on your understanding of key household roles, household workplace infrastructures, and the nuances of performing shopper discovery.
3. Legacy points. When you haven’t mastered the complexities of how charitable and property planning options assist purchasers switch wealth, this phase will provide you with the superior abilities you want.
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Charitable giving and endowments. You’ll study to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of private and non-private charities, foundations, and trusts, in addition to the tax implications of giving methods in complicated shopper eventualities.
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Property trusts and wealth switch. Though components of property planning could lie outdoors your obligations, a full understanding of wealth switch, end-of-life planning, and fiduciary points is important to the work of an HNW wealth advisor.
4. Specialty shopper companies. There are particular challenges concerned with enterprise planning along with HNW purchasers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
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Government compensation. This phase addresses the best way to consider inventory choices, deferred and fairness compensation plans, and concentrated inventory conditions, together with guidelines, restrictions, and tax implications.
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Carefully held companies. As a major inhabitants of the $5 million-plus shopper base, intently held enterprise homeowners want advisors who could make acceptable suggestions about enterprise entity buildings and their tax implications, buy-sell agreements, valuation strategies, the enterprise lifecycle, and succession planning.
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Retirement. To information purchasers with huge belongings via the distribution section, you’ll want to grasp return sequencing, analytical forecasting, tax therapies, Roth conversions, distribution necessities, and analysis of certified plans and internet unrealized appreciation (NUA) guidelines.
So, Is the CPWA Certification a Worthwhile Funding?
If what you are promoting aim is to draw and retain HNW purchasers, the information and insights provided by a CPWA certification could allow you to goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, make sure you’ve gotten a transparent plan earlier than diving in. Making lasting connections together with your desired clientele at all times will depend on your agency’s service choices and the shopper expertise you ship.
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Commonwealth and IWI are separate and unaffiliated entities. Please seek the advice of your member agency’s insurance policies and procure prior approval for any designation/certification packages.