I’m hoping to get a post out on this very topic by this weekend!
In short – of the three licenses (Series 7, 65, and 82), both the Series 7 and the Series 82 require you to be sponsored by a financial firm and/or have a minimum amount of professional financial industry experience in order to be eligible to even sit for the exam. Thus, those exams aren’t even possible for you or me to take, even if we wanted to.
The good news is that the Series 65 exam doesn’t have that type of requirement, so it could be a way for us to qualify as an AI.
There are some benefits to being an accredited investor, even for Reg CF deals. It would remove the investor annual limits (assuming the SEC’s other Reg CF changes get accepted), but perhaps more importantly for some, it would allow you to buy shares of Reg CF companies on the secondary market (like Netcapital) that are less than a year old. Those shares are often tied up under Reg CF 1 year transfer restrictions, so accredited investors have an unfair advantage from being able to purchase some of these offered shares with very little other demand competition.
Also, obviously being an accredited investor comes with many more investment opportunities, such as investing on AngelList or through AngelList funds and syndicates, certain hedge funds and real estate deals, and even would have allowed you to officially invest in the Republic Note last month (which non-accredited investors will have to wait for, until the Reg A+ campaign is qualified).
I really want to create an accredited investor course and certification, which has been on my roadmap (pending these SEC changes) for the past few years. Even the Series 65 isn’t a great exam, since you’ll have to master a bunch of regulations for Registered Investment Advisors that aren’t really applicable to accredited investors and early-stage investing. That’s why I think an accredited-investor specific exam is the future.