Are you a wealth advisor trying to enter or develop your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This shopper section contains enterprise homeowners, executives, artistic professionals, and next-gen heirs with a internet price of $5 million or extra.
These potential shoppers characterize 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 approach to accomplish this aim. However is it well worth the time, effort, and cash you’ll dedicate to the method?
That will help you make your choice, let’s assessment 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 method to addressing the monetary wants of HNW shoppers. 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 high enterprise college
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A 12-month online-only program
The stipulations are:
Lastly, you have to move a four-hour closing examination masking 135 questions.
What Are the Prime 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 shoppers
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Superior data particular to fixing complicated planning challenges
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Potential for greater compensation and profession development
And, current knowledge tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient approach to develop your follow. In keeping with Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the most important common shopper measurement within the trade:

What Will You Study?
The CPWA program’s curriculum is designed to provide the concept and sensible strategies you’ll have to serve HNW shoppers—and to move 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 section will make it easier to analyze and advocate tax-efficient options and discover ways to construct and handle portfolios that meet complicated HNW targets.
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Tax planning. This deep dive into HNW-specific taxation will information you in speaking about methods with shoppers, simplify planning, and make it easier to work successfully with shoppers’ tax attorneys.
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Portfolio administration. This section will elevate your talents to harmonize wealth-building strategies, danger administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with shoppers’ assets and targets.
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Threat administration and asset safety. You’ll study 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 capacity 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 section requires sturdy expertise in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to lift your recreation when serving the extremely prosperous.
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Ethics. Studying to determine and classify moral and regulatory points throughout the wealth administration spectrum will let you work confidently with a complicated shopper base.
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Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intervene with a shopper’s capacity to make sound selections. By studying find out how to determine biases, you’ll be higher geared up 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. Should you haven’t mastered the complexities of how charitable and property planning options assist shoppers switch wealth, this section provides you with the superior expertise you want.
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Charitable giving and endowments. You’ll study 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 situations.
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Property trusts and wealth switch. Though components of property planning might lie exterior your tasks, 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 shoppers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
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Government compensation. This section addresses find out how 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, 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.
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Retirement. To information shoppers with huge belongings via the distribution section, you’ll want to know 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 shoppers, the data and insights provided by a CPWA certification might make it easier to goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, make sure you will have a transparent plan earlier than diving in. Making lasting connections along with your desired clientele all the time is dependent upon 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 acquire prior approval for any designation/certification packages.