The risk and threat landscape for family offices continues to evolve and present new challenges. COVID-19 created new risk issues for families to consider and manage, but the pandemic is only one dimension of the increasingly complex threat environment that family offices face.  The changing and growing ways that family office risk and threat management systems can be breached has made the task increasingly more difficult. Executives continue to struggle to find effective responses to these multi-faceted threats (physical, financial, health, cyber, and privacy-related). Moreover, the attitudes around risk of many principals and family office executives opens this group up to specialized problems. Vendors and families alike have seen this manifest itself in: 1) underestimation or complete unawareness of common threats; 2) frustration and perplexity concerning effective protective measures; and 3) a reactionary mindset within family offices that requires constantly putting out operational fires.

This report uncovered some worrying approaches to the risks family offices face, particularly cyber risk, family-related risk, investment risk and employment-related/insider risks.  Read the report here, which also includes practical tips and recommendations from our experts that you can implement at your family office.

Many thanks to Boston Private for spearheading this research project and to our survey partners The Chertoff Group, McNally Capital and Datatribe for their support in the development and deployment of the survey, and for lending their expert insights into the global risks and threats family offices encounter.