Are you a wealth advisor seeking to enter or develop 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 web value of $5 million or extra.
These potential shoppers symbolize 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 abilities in folks and household dynamics administration.
How are you going to get or fine-tune these abilities? Incomes the Licensed Non-public Wealth Advisor® (CPWA®) certification from the Investments & Wealth Institute (IWI) is one technique 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 evaluation 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 novel, 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 prime enterprise college
A 12-month online-only program
The stipulations are:
Lastly, you should go a four-hour remaining examination masking 135 questions.
What Are the Prime 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 information particular to fixing advanced planning challenges
Potential for increased compensation and profession development
And, current information tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient technique to develop your apply. Based on Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the most important common shopper measurement within the business:
What Will You Study?
The CPWA program’s curriculum is designed to provide the idea and sensible methods you’ll must serve HNW shoppers—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 assist you to analyze and suggest tax-efficient options and learn to construct and handle portfolios that meet advanced HNW targets.
Tax planning. This deep dive into HNW-specific taxation will information you in speaking about methods with shoppers, simplify planning, and assist you to work successfully with shoppers’ tax attorneys.
Portfolio administration. This phase will elevate your talents to harmonize wealth-building methods, danger 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 via life occasions together with marriage, divorce, and loss of life.
The [CPWA program] content material was unbelievable and considerably elevated my means 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 abilities in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to boost your recreation when serving the extremely prosperous.
Ethics. Studying to establish and classify moral and regulatory points throughout the wealth administration spectrum will can help you work confidently with a complicated shopper base.
Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intrude with a shopper’s means to make sound selections. By studying the right way to 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 upon your understanding of key household roles, household workplace infrastructures, and the nuances of performing shopper discovery.
3. Legacy points. For those who haven’t mastered the complexities of how charitable and property planning options assist shoppers switch wealth, this phase offers you the superior abilities 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 advanced shopper eventualities.
Property trusts and wealth switch. Though elements of property planning might lie outdoors your tasks, 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 providers. There are particular challenges concerned with enterprise planning along side HNW shoppers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
Govt compensation. This phase addresses the right 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 big inhabitants of the $5 million-plus shopper base, carefully held enterprise house owners 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 shoppers with huge property 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 web unrealized appreciation (NUA) guidelines.
So, Is the CPWA Certification a Worthwhile Funding?
If your small business aim is to draw and retain HNW shoppers, the information and insights provided by a CPWA certification might assist you to goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, ensure you have got a transparent plan earlier than diving in. Making lasting connections along 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 acquire prior approval for any designation/certification applications.
