As the rich get richer and
Demand is also rising for the certified private wealth advisor certification, an industry credential for advisors who specialize in working with those high net worth clients.
With the
"In order to serve clients with over $10 million, a lot of firms are starting to say, 'You've got to have a CPWA,'" Walters said. "'Because we need to protect ourselves from liability. We need to protect the client from you not knowing what you're doing.'"
Firms that shell out to help their advisors obtain extra credentials like the CPWA can get an edge in the recruiting market, Walters said. Many firms,
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Baird is the group's oldest private training partner, and Merrill Lynch is the largest such partner, a spokesperson for IWI said in an email. Newer partners have included Osaic and Commonwealth Financial Network. "The IWI team is collaborating with Osaic leadership to roll out an in-house CPWA training program," the spokesperson said in an email.
Leslie Roper Day, an advisor who is the founder of Leslie Roper Day & Associates, an affiliated branch office of Commonwealth based in Folsom, California, said Commonwealth's newly launched program for advisors to obtain the CPWA helped persuade her to obtain the certification, which was a time-consuming process. The course taught "really in-depth material," she said in an interview. "There were mountains of reading."
It helped that she was going through the course as part of a cohort of 50 at Commonwealth taking it at the same time, Roper Day said. "I really liked the camaraderie."
"This is an area where Commonwealth advisors have become more and more competitive, which follows a trend that independent firms are gaining market share in the high net worth space," said Kenton Shirk, the vice president of practice management at Commonwealth Financial Network. Shirk said advisors had been asking for more support in growing their practices organically, and Commonwealth chose the CPWA for the level of "technical depth" it offered.
The firm's pilot in-house CPWA training program took a year to launch. In January, 50 candidates — 41 advisors and 9 home office employees — began self-study for the program, which involved around 10 hours a week, Shirk said. Then in June, the cohort attended a weeklong training at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and they began sitting for the exam over the summer — with a "significant" number of the cohort members having already passed, he said.
Below, Financial Planning presents a brief guide to the CPWA.
