Are you a wealth advisor seeking to enter or broaden your attain within the high-net-worth (HNW) market? This consumer section consists of enterprise house owners, executives, artistic professionals, and next-gen heirs with a web 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 individuals 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 option to accomplish this objective. However is it definitely worth the time, effort, and cash you’ll dedicate to the method?
That can assist 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 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 faculty
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A 12-month online-only program
The stipulations are:
Lastly, you need to go 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:
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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 increased compensation and profession development
And, latest knowledge tells us {that a} CPWA certification could also be an efficient option to develop your observe. In keeping with Cerulli Associates, CPWA practices have the biggest common consumer measurement within the trade:

What Will You Study?
The CPWA program’s curriculum is designed to provide the principle 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 important to optimizing planning for the ultrawealthy. This section will allow you to analyze and advocate tax-efficient options and learn 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 allow you to work successfully with shoppers’ tax attorneys.
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Portfolio administration. This section will elevate your talents to harmonize wealth-building methods, threat administration, tax consciousness, and portfolio methods with shoppers’ assets and targets.
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Threat administration and asset safety. You’ll study to guage applicable 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 skill 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 consumer section requires sturdy expertise in managing expectations, decision-making, and relationships, however you’ll want to boost your sport 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 consumer base.
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Behavioral finance. Cognitive and emotional biases can intrude with a consumer’s skill to make sound choices. By studying the best way to determine biases, you’ll be higher geared up to appropriate or complement these tendencies.
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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 consumer 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 section will provide 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 consumer situations.
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Property trusts and wealth switch. Though elements of property planning could lie outdoors 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 consumer providers. There are particular challenges concerned with enterprise planning at the side of HNW shoppers’ broader planning and portfolio administration wants.
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Govt compensation. This section addresses the best way 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 consumer base, intently held enterprise house owners want advisors who could make applicable 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 part, you’ll want to grasp 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 your online business objective is to draw and retain HNW shoppers, the data and insights provided by a CPWA certification could allow you 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 depends upon your agency’s service choices and the consumer 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.