Why is insider risk higher in a family office?

A handful of people hold concentrated access to money, documents, and the family's private life, often with shared logins and no offboarding discipline. That combination — high trust, high access, low process — is exactly where insider misuse thrives.

What should happen the day someone leaves?

Access to every system should be removed the same day, shared passwords rotated, personal-device access revoked, and a record kept of what they could reach. Delayed offboarding is one of the most common gaps we find.

Playbook 8

Insider misuse & departing-employee risk

A trusted employee, advisor, or departing staff member copies files, keeps access, or misuses standing credentials — the small-team family office has few people but enormous concentrated access.

The hard truth

In a five-person office, the person you trust most is also the person with the keys to everything.

The first hour

1
Suspend the individual's access across email, files, banking, and the wealth platform the same hour.
2
Preserve logs and evidence before anyone can alter them.
3
Inventory what they could access and what may have been copied or forwarded.
4
Rotate shared passwords and revoke any personal-device access.
5
Loop in counsel before taking action that could affect a later claim.

Stop the next one

Same-day offboarding: access removed the moment someone leaves.
Least-privilege access and no shared logins — everything attributable.
Audit logging on financial and document systems.
Clear acceptable-use and data-handling policies staff acknowledge.