Are you a wealth advisor seeking to enter or broaden your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This shopper phase contains enterprise homeowners, executives, inventive professionals, and next-gen heirs with a internet value of $5 million or extra.
These potential purchasers characterize a various group with distinctive challenges and life targets far past asset accumulation. To draw and retain HNW purchasers, you’ll want superior technical experience and nuanced expertise in individuals and household dynamics administration.
How are you going to get or fine-tune these expertise? Incomes the Licensed Non-public 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 can assist you make your choice, let’s evaluate 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 singular, multidisciplinary method to addressing the monetary wants of HNW purchasers. Candidates to this system can select between two enrollment choices:
-
A 6-month on-line program together with a 1-week, in-person class at a prime enterprise faculty
-
A 12-month online-only program
The conditions are:
Lastly, you have 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:
-
Aggressive differentiation within the crowded HNW market
-
Extra confidence in working with ultrawealthy purchasers
-
Superior data particular to fixing complicated planning challenges
-
Potential for increased compensation and profession development
And, latest information tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient approach to develop your observe. In keeping with 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 principle 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 massive image is crucial to optimizing planning for the ultrawealthy. This phase will aid you analyze and advocate tax-efficient options and learn to construct and handle portfolios that meet complicated HNW targets.
-
Tax planning. This deep dive into HNW-specific taxation will information you in speaking about methods with purchasers, simplify planning, and aid you work successfully with purchasers’ tax attorneys.
-
Portfolio administration. This phase will elevate your talents to harmonize wealth-building methods, danger administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with purchasers’ assets and targets.
-
Threat administration and asset safety. You’ll be taught to guage acceptable insurance coverage and asset methods to guard purchasers by life occasions together with marriage, divorce, and dying.
The [CPWA program] content material was unbelievable and considerably elevated my capacity 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 expertise in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to lift your sport when serving the extremely prosperous.
-
Ethics. Studying to establish and classify moral and regulatory points throughout the wealth administration spectrum will assist you to work confidently with a complicated shopper base.
-
Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intrude with a shopper’s capacity to make sound choices. By studying how you can establish biases, you’ll be higher geared up to right or complement these tendencies.
-
Household dynamics. Tailoring methods for household organizations, trusts, and enterprise entities will rely on your understanding of key household roles, household workplace infrastructures, and the nuances of performing shopper discovery.
3. Legacy points. In case you haven’t mastered the complexities of how charitable and property planning options assist purchasers switch wealth, this phase gives you the superior expertise you want.
-
Charitable giving and endowments. You’ll be taught 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 situations.
-
Property trusts and wealth switch. Though elements of property planning might lie outdoors your obligations, a full understanding of wealth switch, end-of-life planning, and fiduciary points is crucial to the work of an HNW wealth advisor.
4. Specialty shopper companies. There are particular challenges concerned with enterprise planning together with HNW purchasers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
-
Govt compensation. This phase addresses how you can consider inventory choices, deferred and fairness compensation plans, and concentrated inventory conditions, together with guidelines, restrictions, and tax implications.
-
Intently held companies. As a major inhabitants of the $5 million-plus shopper base, carefully 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.
-
Retirement. To information purchasers with huge belongings by the distribution section, you’ll want to grasp return sequencing, analytical forecasting, tax remedies, Roth conversions, distribution necessities, and analysis of certified plans and internet unrealized appreciation (NUA) guidelines.
So, Is the CPWA Certification a Worthwhile Funding?
If your enterprise aim is to draw and retain HNW purchasers, the data and insights supplied by a CPWA certification might aid you goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, ensure you might have a transparent plan earlier than diving in. Making lasting connections together with your desired clientele all the time depends upon your agency’s service choices and the shopper expertise you ship.
FREE DOWNLOAD
Superior Monetary Planning Methods
for Excessive-Web-Value Purchasers
Discover inventive, complete monetary planning options—from asset safety to
charitable giving—on your high-net-worth purchasers’ distinctive wants.
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.