The SPARK Institute and TRAU (The Retirement Advisor University) announced Friday that they’ve agreed to combine their industry training programs into one comprehensive educational offering for retirement plan advisors, providers and industry professionals.
SPARK currently offers the Accredited Retirement Plan Consultant (ARPC) designation, designed for sales and marketing professionals, and the Accredited Retirement Plan Specialist (ARPS) designation, for administrative and recordkeeping professionals.
TRAU and its affiliate TPSU (The Plan Sponsor University) offers the Certified 401(k) Professional, or C(k)P, designation in collaboration with UCLA Anderson School of Management.
“We’ve been looking to do an online certification for a while, but we didn’t want to take anything away from the C(k)P,” Fred Barstein, founder and CEO of The Retirement Advisor University, said. “We didn’t want to do a C(k)P-light and have an advisor be able to use our brand and not go through what a C(k)P goes through.”
Calling the new partnership a “perfect confluence,” he added that SPARK has the industry’s oldest 401k-specific designation.
“It got to a point where they had to start investing in technology and it didn’t make sense for them. They also want to try to reach out to advisors a little bit more. They had offers to sell, but they really wanted a partner, and this is a true partnership.”
Combined offerings
The partnership will result in 57 course offerings, and additional topics are currently (or soon to be) in development. They include cybersecurity, wealth management and rollovers, and behavioral finance/technology.
“We’ll go to the recordkeeping TPAs, as we always have, but what we’re finding is that the specialists—the aggregators and the regional firms, and even the larger advisors—they don’t have any training capabilities at all, and yet they have staff and junior advisors,” Barstein said. “So some of these designations are for internal people. We want to make it very practical, as opposed to just technical.”
While many of the course will be automated and online, Barstein said more in-person, peer-to-peer regional courses will also be offered.
“It’s for staff training and for specialists. It’ll help specialists leverage their position to do more wealth management and things like cybersecurity,” he concluded. “A big, big market for us is also going after the wealth management advisors who might have backed into retirement plans.”
With more than 20 years serving financial markets, John Sullivan is the former editor-in-chief of Investment Advisor magazine and retirement editor of ThinkAdvisor.com. Sullivan is also the former editor of Boomer Market Advisor and Bank Advisor magazines, and has a background in the insurance and investment industries in addition to his journalism roots.
