Working With Family Offices
Family offices manage a distinctive combination of exposures. At the personal level, the principals you serve face the risks that come with high-profile individuals and significant assets: targeted financial crime, account takeover, data broker profiles that give attackers a running start, and connected home systems with no meaningful security protecting them. At the operational level, the office itself manages wire transfers, holds sensitive financial and personal data, coordinates with banks and advisors, and has staff with broad access to accounts and schedules.
Personal wealth, institutional data, and broad staff access make the office and its principals an attractive target. Forty-three percent of family offices globally reported experiencing a cyberattack in the past two years, with North American offices attacked at a higher rate than any other region.¹ The predominant method is not technically sophisticated: it is phishing and social engineering, where an attacker impersonates a financial contact, an advisor, or a principal and targets staff who handle wire instructions or account access. The damage is often fast and difficult to reverse.
We work with family offices on two levels.
Protecting the principals and the household. For each principal, we build an accurate picture of digital exposure — public footprint, data broker presence, account vulnerabilities, household staff access — and act on what we find. These engagements draw from our Personal Cyber Exposure Review, Digital Privacy Hardening, and Vestry services, deployed to the specific profile and household of each principal.
Protecting the office operation. For the office itself, we assess email security, wire transfer workflows, vendor relationships, and staff access architecture. We identify where an impersonation attack or a compromised account could redirect funds or expose client data, and we produce a plain-English report your team can act on. This is our Security Posture & Risk Review, bookable directly.
For offices that want ongoing access to a security-aware perspective — a person they can call when something unusual surfaces, not a helpdesk ticket — our SMB Advisory Retainer provides a monthly 45-minute call and async access between sessions for $750 per month.
Fiduciary duty and client trust are the foundation of what you do. A breach that exposes client financial data or allows a fraudulent wire to clear is a financial event, a compliance event, and in many jurisdictions, a reportable one.