Are you a wealth advisor trying to enter or develop your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This shopper phase contains enterprise house owners, executives, inventive professionals, and next-gen heirs with a web price of $5 million or extra.
These potential purchasers symbolize 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 expertise in folks and household dynamics administration.
How will you 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 can assist you make your resolution, let’s evaluation what getting a CPWA certification entails and the way it may gain advantage wealth advisors who want to serve HNW purchasers.
What Is a CPWA Certification?
The CPWA certification program entails a singular, 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 high enterprise college
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A 12-month online-only program
The stipulations are:
Lastly, it’s essential to move a four-hour ultimate examination protecting 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 purchasers
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Superior data particular to fixing complicated planning challenges
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Potential for greater compensation and profession development
And, latest information tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient approach to develop your follow. In accordance with Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the most important common shopper measurement 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 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 phase will allow you to analyze and advocate tax-efficient options and learn 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 talents to harmonize wealth-building methods, danger administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with purchasers’ assets and objectives.
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Danger administration and asset safety. You’ll be taught to guage acceptable insurance coverage and asset methods to guard purchasers by means of life occasions together with marriage, divorce, and loss of life.
The [CPWA program] content material was implausible 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 phase requires sturdy expertise in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to boost your recreation 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 let you work confidently with a classy 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 tips on how to establish biases, you’ll be higher outfitted to appropriate 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. 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.
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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.
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Property trusts and wealth switch. Though elements of property planning could lie exterior 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 providers. There are particular challenges concerned with enterprise planning along with HNW purchasers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
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Govt compensation. This phase addresses tips on 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 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.
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Retirement. To information purchasers with huge property by means of the distribution section, you’ll want to know return sequencing, analytical forecasting, tax remedies, Roth conversions, distribution necessities, and analysis of certified plans and web 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 data and insights provided by a CPWA certification could allow you to goal—and higher serve—this nook of the advisory market. However, be certain 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 applications.