Wealth advisers say their rich clients are increasingly
asking for help securing homes, vetting household staff, setting up security
for travel and guarding personal and financial information online. ACE Private
Risk Services, a unit of insurer ACE Group, refers its high-net-worth clients
to the Guidry Group, a Montgomery, Texas-based firm that conducts everything
from household-staff background checks to social-media security assessments and
stalker deterrence. The referral is free or discounted based on the
property-insurance premiums ACE clients pay, says David Spencer, who runs the
insurer’s premier-client group.
American International Group’s Private Client Group assigns
a dedicated risk manager to its clients who pay $250,000 or more in annual
insurance premiums. The group has planned and carried out the transport of a
client’s artwork from one place to another, and last summer hired a security
team to accompany a family who were taking a cruise on their yacht from Mexico
to Brazil for the World Cup.
Chicago-based Hillard Heintze works with clients of private
banks and wealth advisers and does detailed household-staff screenings for
$4,000 and up. The firm, which was founded by a former U.S. Secret Service
agent and a former Chicago police superintendent, also will sweep a home for
hidden audio or video monitoring devices for about $2,000 a room or $10,000 for
a whole house. It also devises family emergency plans for $7,500, including “go
packs” filled with food, money, clothing and a satellite phone.
One of the services offered by New York-based Risk Control
Strategies is analyzing travel itineraries and making security recommendations.
Demand has been growing, the firm says.
In 2011, it reviewed 141 itineraries at a cost of $750 each.
Last year, it looked over 491. So far this year, it has done 549. One of the
biggest concerns: arranging reliable local ground transportation to minimize
the risk of kidnapping.
Families that run their own investment offices have another
issue: how to secure financial information from the prying eyes of
cybercriminals. Data encryption and round-the-clock system monitoring for
intruders can run anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 a year.
In an annual survey released this year by Bank of
America’s U.S. Trust private-banking division, 69% of high-net-worth people
said they were concerned about the security of their financial information. In
households with more than $10 million of financial assets, 40% of survey
respondents said they had made changes to protect their assets.
In September, UBS’s private U.S. wealth-management
division, which works with people who have $10 million or more, rolled out a
new online-security program from MetLife that tracks a family or
individual’s online information—everything from personal, financial and medical
information to a child’s social-media usage.
For $495 a year for a family, or $245 for an individual, the
MetLife Defender software will detect and remove or block suspicious activity,
continually monitor credit, check on a child’s social-media activity for
cyberbullying or predatory activity, and pay to fix credit or reputational
issues that arise online.
At Citigroup, whose Citi Private Bank unit is geared
toward those with $25 million and up, clients around the country have flocked
to lunch and dinner seminars to hear Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and
other law-enforcement officials talk about Internet security and how to prevent
online fraud.
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