Are you a wealth advisor trying to enter or increase your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This shopper phase contains enterprise house owners, executives, artistic professionals, and next-gen heirs with a internet value of $5 million or extra.
These potential shoppers signify a various group with distinctive challenges and life targets far past asset accumulation. To draw and retain HNW shoppers, you’ll want superior technical experience and nuanced expertise in folks 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 method to accomplish this purpose. However is it definitely worth the time, effort, and cash you’ll dedicate to the method?
That will help you make your resolution, let’s overview what getting a CPWA certification entails and the way it may benefit wealth advisors who want to serve HNW shoppers.
What Is a CPWA Certification?
The CPWA certification program entails a singular, multidisciplinary strategy to addressing the monetary wants of HNW shoppers. 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 high enterprise faculty
-
A 12-month online-only program
The stipulations are:
Lastly, you will need to move a four-hour last examination masking 135 questions.
What Are the High Causes to Think about 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 shoppers
-
Superior data particular to fixing complicated planning challenges
-
Potential for greater compensation and profession development
And, latest information tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient method to develop your follow. In accordance with Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the biggest common shopper dimension within the trade:
What Will You Study?
The CPWA program’s curriculum is designed to provide the concept and sensible methods you’ll have to serve HNW shoppers—and to move the required certification examination. The 11 core matters are damaged down into the next 4 classes:
1. Wealth administration. Understanding the massive image is important to optimizing planning for the ultrawealthy. This phase will aid you analyze and suggest 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 shoppers, simplify planning, and aid you work successfully with shoppers’ tax attorneys.
-
Portfolio administration. This phase will elevate your skills to harmonize wealth-building methods, threat administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with shoppers’ sources and targets.
-
Threat administration and asset safety. You’ll be taught to judge acceptable insurance coverage and asset methods to guard shoppers by life occasions together with marriage, divorce, and loss of life.
The [CPWA program] content material was incredible and considerably elevated my potential so as to add worth to my goal market ($1 million–$5 million investable, primarily company VP-level folks).”
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 boost your sport when serving the extremely prosperous.
-
Ethics. Studying to determine and classify moral and regulatory points throughout the wealth administration spectrum will permit you to work confidently with a complicated shopper base.
-
Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intrude with a shopper’s potential to make sound selections. By studying the way to determine biases, you’ll be higher outfitted to appropriate or complement these tendencies.
-
Household dynamics. Tailoring methods for household organizations, trusts, and enterprise entities will rely upon your understanding of key household roles, household workplace infrastructures, and the nuances of performing shopper discovery.
3. Legacy points. In the event you haven’t mastered the complexities of how charitable and property planning options assist shoppers switch wealth, this phase will provide you with the superior expertise you want.
-
Charitable giving and endowments. You’ll be taught to evaluate the benefits and downsides of private and non-private charities, foundations, and trusts, in addition to the tax implications of giving methods in complicated shopper eventualities.
-
Property trusts and wealth switch. Though elements of property planning could lie exterior your duties, 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 together with HNW shoppers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
-
Government compensation. This phase addresses the way to 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, intently held enterprise house owners want advisors who could make acceptable suggestions about enterprise entity constructions and their tax implications, buy-sell agreements, valuation strategies, the enterprise lifecycle, and succession planning.
-
Retirement. To information shoppers with huge belongings by the distribution part, you’ll want to know 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 your enterprise purpose is to draw and retain HNW shoppers, the data and insights supplied by a CPWA certification could aid you goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, make certain you’ve got a transparent plan earlier than diving in. Making lasting connections together with your desired clientele all the time is determined by your agency’s service choices and the shopper expertise you ship.
FREE DOWNLOAD
Superior Monetary Planning Methods
for Excessive-Web-Price Shoppers
Discover artistic, complete monetary planning options—from asset safety to
charitable giving—on your high-net-worth shoppers’ 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.