Cybersecurity: why your practice could make the ideal target

It’s a sobering premise: hacking today is roughly 99% human manipulation and only 1% technical exploit. Banks, custodians and platform providers have invested heavily in technological defences, which means fraudsters have moved on - to the people sitting in front of the screen. For financial advisers, that is a direct operational risk. Your practice handles client identity documents, mandates, payment instructions and email traffic about money movement; from a fraudster's perspective, that is an exceptionally attractive target. From this practical session, advisers will leave with a concrete checklist for their own practices: where the highest-risk moments in your workflow sit, the handful of process controls that prevent the majority of losses, how to coach clients on what your firm will and will not ever ask them to do, and how to respond in the first hour if something does go wrong. The aim is not to make you a cybersecurity expert, it is to make your practice a materially harder target.