ZAG Partners With Kitces.com For Advisor Education

Minneapolis, MN (November 16, 2020) – Zero Alpha Group (ZAG), a national association of leading wealth management firms committed to applying the best financial thinking to service clients in a fiduciary capacity, and who collectively manage over $23 billion in client assets, announced this week a new partnership with Kitces.com to provide advanced education to advisors of the 8 ZAG member firms.

The new partnership will provide Kitces.com’s advanced financial planning educational content, including the popular Nerd’s Eye View blog, Kitces on-demand webinars, and original Kitces Research white papers, to ZAG member firm advisors, for their annual CFP, CPA, Enrolled Agent, IWI, and other professional designation continuing education needs. In addition, the Kitces Education team will provide additional exclusive live stream webinars for ZAG member firms on advanced planning topics.

“We’ve long admired the advanced educational content of Michael’s Nerd’s Eye View blog, and his content is actively read amongst our advisors already,” said  John Stephens, ZAG Chairman and CEO of ZAG member firm TCI Wealth Advisors. “It was only natural to extend the relationship further and allow our advisors to gain Continuing Education credit for the content they were already reading.”

“With the coronavirus pandemic disrupting ZAG’s exclusive in-person advisor forums and other traditional advisor educational opportunities ZAG has been heavily engaged in finding educational content that has the depth and quality necessary to educate leading wealth management firms,” according to Katie Cullen, CEO and executive director of ZAG. “With Kitces.com, we know and can trust that the content will cover the advanced educational planning needs of our member firms and at a fraction of the cost of the traditional advisor conferences,” said Cullen.

The agreement with Zero Alpha Group comes at a time of significant growth for Kitces.com, which in recent years has expanded its educational offering to include continuing education for not only CFP professionals but also CPAs, Enrolled Agents, CPWA and CIMA certifications, and other self-reported financial planning designations recently rolled out a unique new CFP Ethics CE program and has been rapidly hiring to meet the demand for more advanced advisor education as a growing number of financial advisors obtain baseline CFP certification and seek to further extend their knowledge.

“The disruption of the coronavirus pandemic, and the concomitant shift to online education, has led to a rapid increase in demand for Kitces.com advanced educational content, with our Members Section up more than 20% in the first half of 2020, and our inquiries for webinar engagements up more than 100%,” said Kitces.com Publisher and Chief Financial Planning Nerd Michael Kitces. “As while there has been no shortage of free webinars and free CE in the advisor community – which has only amplified with conferences shutting down for 2020 – you usually get what you pay for, and for experienced advisors and leading wealth management firms, there’s still no substitute for continuing education that actually teaches you something new and useful to apply with your clients.”