10 Moves to Risk-Ready Your Family Office
Family office security isn’t about luck — it’s about preparation. Threat actors only need one opening, but you need airtight defenses every time. Complacency is the enemy of resilience.
These 10 principles will help keep your family office ahead of the game.
1
Conduct Balanced, Comprehensive Security Assessments and Update Plans Regularly
Do: Routinely evaluate cyber, physical, financial, legal, reputational, operational, insider, kidnapping/extortion, home invasion, and political threats, ensuring balanced attention without over-focusing on any single threat category.
❌ Don’t: Treat risk management like playing half-court tennis — only focusing on what’s directly in front of you while ignoring what’s coming from outside your line of sight. Avoid over-indexing on one risk type. Risk domains are interconnected and can’t be treated as silos. Unknown threats exist, and the biggest risks often come from external forces (geopolitical shifts, new technologies, cybercriminal networks). If you don’t scan the full court, you’ll get blindsided by risks you never saw coming.
2
Implement Rigorous Insider Threat Detection and Prevention Programs
Do: Perform regular background checks on staff, contractors, advisors, and vendors while continuously monitoring for red flags.
❌ Don’t: Leave the vault door open just because you trust the bank teller. Insider threats often come from those closest to the organization and can be intentional or unintentional. Access should be controlled, monitored, and regularly reassessed—trust alone is not a security plan.
3
Establish Multi-Layered Physical Security for Properties and Assets
Do: Build layered defenses based on detection, deterrence, delay, and defense methodology, and reassess risk on a regular basis.
❌ Don’t: Think of physical security like a single padlock on a door—one layer of defense is never enough. Sophisticated attackers will find a way through, but layered security ensures they have to go through multiple obstacles, buying time for recognition and response.
4
Proactively Manage Reputation and Privacy Risks
Do: Continuously monitor media, social networks, and data broker sites for malicious content or exposed personal information. Conduct regular digital vulnerability audits to identify and remove personally identifiable information (PII) from public databases, ensuring your privacy isn’t an easy target for bad actors.
❌ Don’t: Leave your front door wide open and hope no one walks in — your personal data is valuable to criminals. Bad actors exploit exposed PII for fraud, identity theft, and even physical threats. Your personal data and reputation live far beyond what you control. Unchecked misinformation can damage your reputation and finances before you have a chance to respond. Proactively lock down your digital footprint before it becomes a liability.
5
Implement Advanced Travel Security Protocols and Crisis Contingency Plans
Do: Conduct pre-travel risk assessments, train family/staff in situational awareness, and establish crisis, extraction, and contingency plans.
❌ Don’t: Believe that travel security is like checking the weather — just because it was safe yesterday doesn’t mean it will be tomorrow. Situations change rapidly: Complacency can put family members and employees at risk. Always reassess, even in familiar places.
6
Enforce Stringent Financial Controls and Proactive Compliance Measures
Do: Require multi-modal approval for transactions, rotate staff handling finances, enforce mandatory vacations for staff, and monitor for anomalies through regular audits.
❌ Don’t: Let one person hold the keys to the vault—unchecked authority is like a factory with no quality control. Implement checks, balances, and oversight to prevent fraud, errors, or coercion from crashing your financial safeguards.
7
Strengthen Cybersecurity and Digital Protection Practices
Do: Engage professionals to ensure networks, devices, and IT systems are securely set up, consistently monitored, and tested.
❌ Don’t: Think of cybersecurity as a castle wall and assume you're safe behind it. Attackers don’t need to storm the front gate --- they can find weak points, like an unlocked side door, fly over with a drone, or mimic trusted voices and adjust in real-time with AI-powered attacks. A strong cyber defense requires constant adaptation, training, monitoring for tampering, and verifying who has access, what they’re doing, and whether they are who they claim to be.
8
Ensure Complete Legal and Regulatory Readiness
Do: Conduct regular legal and regulatory audits, proactively monitor law changes and engage legal counsel to adapt strategies, and properly document compliance activities.
❌ Don’t: Assume the laws and regulations are a fixed road map. Regulations shift, and legal missteps can have catastrophic financial and reputational consequences.
9
Practice Regular Crisis Response Drills and Continuity Exercises
Do: Conduct tabletop exercises and practical drills for cyberattacks, kidnapping/extortion, natural disasters, and public relations crises.
❌ Don’t: Treat a crisis plan like a fire extinguisher you’ve never used—if you don’t practice, you won’t know how to respond. When a real crisis happens, confusion and hesitation are your enemies. Drills make response instinctive.
10
Foster a Risk-Aware Culture Committed to Continuous Improvement
Do: Encourage proactive risk reporting, hold regular “lessons-learned” reviews, and continuously update risk priorities.
❌ Don’t: Fall victim to the illusion of security and survivorship bias—just because you haven’t been breached before doesn’t mean your defenses are future-proof. Learn from near misses, external case studies, and evolving threats to stay ahead. Complacency is the enemy of resilience. Review, test, and challenge your team and systems regularly to stay ahead.
Is your family office truly risk-ready?
The biggest threats aren’t the ones you see—they’re the ones you don’t. At Presage Global, we specialize in anticipating risks, closing security gaps, and future-proofing your defenses before a crisis strikes.
Let’s build a customized risk strategy that keeps your wealth, privacy, and security protected. Contact us today to take control of your risk landscape.