IT, Cybersecurity, and AI Governance for Canadian Family Offices
Managed IT and CISSP-led cybersecurity for Canadian single-family offices (SFOs), multi-family offices (MFOs), and the household, advisory, and back-office staff who support ultra-high-net-worth families across Toronto, Calgary, Vancouver, and Montreal.
Fusion Computing operates the IT, identity, and AI-governance stack family offices need: principal-and-family privacy hardening, household-staff access control, wire-transfer fraud workflow, travel security, cross-border tax-data handling, and discreet vendor practice. We do not publish client names. We do not display family-office logos. We sign whatever NDA your counsel writes.
Best fit for Canadian single-family offices, multi-family offices, and private-wealth structures managing $50M+ in family assets.
Why family-office IT is unlike wealth-management or private-bank IT
According to the Canadian Securities Administrators (2024), National Instrument 31-103 is the core registration rule governing dealers, advisers, and investment fund managers in Canada, with single-family offices generally exempt from registration when they do not hold themselves out to the public. A family office operates under a fundamentally different control floor than a CIRO-registered wealth firm and requires a different IT posture.
A family office serves one family, or in the multi-family case a small number of related families, rather than an arms-length client book. The IT posture has to start from a different first principle than a CIRO-regulated wealth firm. A wealth firm is built to demonstrate suitability to a regulator across a thousand clients. A family office is built to disappear.
The threat model follows from that. CIRO dealers and OSC-registered portfolio managers worry about advisor laptops, KYC repositories, and client-facing portals. Family offices worry about kidnap-ransom intelligence-gathering against the principal’s children, social engineering of a household manager who books travel and pays vendors, BEC fraud on a seven or eight-figure wire transfer, and a deepfake voicemail purporting to be from the principal instructing the controller to release funds.
PIPEDA applies to all family-office handling of personal information regardless of registration status. Sources: asc.ca, securities-administrators.ca, blg.com, priv.gc.ca.
The Canadian family-office landscape is small but established, concentrated in Toronto and Calgary with a meaningful Vancouver and Montreal presence. Visible firms include Northwood Family Office, Richter Family Office, and BMO Private Wealth, plus a long tail of single-family offices serving founder-wealth families that do not appear in any directory. Industry coverage centres on canadianfamilyoffices.com and Wealth Professional Canada.
If your family office needs a discreet, NDA-first IT and AI-governance review, talk to a family-office IT specialist.
The eight family-office IT control domains
According to the Deloitte (2024) Family Office Cybersecurity Report, 43 percent of family offices globally experienced a cyberattack in the prior 12 to 24 months, rising to 57 percent in North America and 62 percent for offices managing over $1 billion AUM. Phishing was the leading attack vector at 93 percent of victim cases. The eight control domains below are scoped to that documented threat profile.
Fusion runs a family-office engagement against eight control domains. The domains map to where family offices actually lose money, lose data, or lose privacy.
Why family offices are disproportionately targeted: Deloitte’s 2024 Family Office Cybersecurity Report found 43% of family offices globally experienced a cyberattack in the prior 12-24 months, rising to 57% in North America and 62% for offices managing more than $1 billion. A 2025 Omega Systems survey found 83% of family offices are concerned about deepfake and impersonation campaigns targeting their principals, but only 60% believe their staff could detect an AI-driven phishing attempt. Large wealth concentrations managed by very small teams: that asymmetry is exactly the threat-model framing this page is built around. Sources: deloitte.com, omegasystemscorp.com.
Wire-transfer fraud and the family-office BEC playbook
According to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (2024), the IC3 2024 Annual Report logged $2.77 billion in BEC losses across 21,442 incidents, with cumulative BEC losses since 2015 totaling $17.1 billion (more than 1,025 percent growth over the decade). Family offices managing seven and eight-figure wires through a small human surface sit in the highest-value tier of that target profile.
Family offices are a top-tier BEC target: wires are large (seven or eight figures for real-estate closings, fund commitments, tax payments, trust distributions) and the human surface is small and trusting. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report tracked $2.77 billion across 21,442 BEC incidents, with 2025 AI-enabled fraud at $893 million. Deepfake voice cloning needs as little as three seconds of audio scraped from a podcast or conference recording; the February 2024 Hong Kong case (a $25M transfer authorised on a deepfake video call) is the canonical example.
Fusion runs a documented wire workflow that survives both email-spoofing BEC and voice-clone BEC. It does not depend on the controller spotting the attack; it depends on a process that fails closed when verification is incomplete.
- Out-of-band callback on a known number. Every wire above the family-defined threshold triggers a callback to a number from a pre-shared directory, never the email signature or the request itself.
- Dual approval on elevated transfers. Controller plus a second authorised approver (CFO, principal, or named trustee) confirm through independent channels. Neither can release alone.
- Deepfake-resistant principal verification. When the principal’s voice is the trigger, the controller verifies via a pre-agreed challenge phrase, a callback to a known device, or in-person confirmation. “The principal called me and asked me to wire it” is no longer a defensible audit trail.
- Written exception path. Emergency-wire bypasses are logged, signed off after the fact, and reviewed at the next family meeting. No silent bypasses.
- Tenant-side controls. Exchange Online anti-impersonation rules, conditional access, sensitivity labels on wire-instruction documents, and Purview audit-log retention sit behind the human workflow.
AI governance for family-office decision-making
According to IBM (2025), the Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 found 97 percent of breached organizations that experienced an AI-related security incident lacked proper AI access controls, and 63 percent of organizations researched had no AI governance policies in place. Family offices adopting Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, or Claude for Work without governance sit inside that documented risk window.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude for Work, and Gemini for Workspace are all now being used inside family offices to draft investment memos, summarise manager reports, and prepare family-meeting briefs. The governance question is the one most offices have not answered: who is allowed to use AI, on what material, with what audit trail, and what happens to that access when the staff member leaves.
Fusion configures family-office AI governance against four anchors. Tenant-scoping: Copilot operates inside the family-office M365 boundary; prompts never train an external model; consumer ChatGPT and Claude are blocked at the network and identity layer on managed devices. Sensitivity-label enforcement: Purview labels on family-investment documents, trust records, and personal HNW files are honoured by Copilot at retrieval, so a junior staff account cannot summarise a document they were not entitled to read.
Family-principal-only tier: certain memo categories (draft investment commitments, draft trust amendments, draft governance changes) are restricted to the principal’s account. Succession-planning of AI access: API tokens, Copilot configuration, and any custom GPT or Claude project are documented alongside the principal’s password manager so the next generation does not inherit an unaudited AI footprint.
The audit trail matters. Family offices increasingly face AI-use due-diligence questions from custodians, co-investing partners, and outside counsel, and “we use it informally” is no longer adequate. Purview retention on Copilot interactions, a written AI use policy approved by the principal, and a documented quarterly review are now the basic ask. For a tenant-scoped Copilot configuration plus written AI use policy template, request a scoping conversation.
What family-office IT costs
Family-office IT pricing reflects the small headcount, the high data sensitivity, and the discretion premium. Most family offices in our portfolio land in one of three bands.
| Family-office size | Typical scope | Indicative monthly range |
|---|---|---|
| SFO, 1 to 5 staff | Principal-and-family identity protection, M365 Business Premium tenant, household-staff access control, wire-transfer workflow, travel security, baseline AI governance | $1,500 to $3,500 |
| SFO, 6 to 15 staff | Adds Purview sensitivity labels, tenant-scoped Copilot, succession-planning IT inventory, cross-border tax-data flows, vCISO touchpoints, quarterly family-meeting IT brief | $4,000 to $8,500 |
| MFO, 16 to 40 staff | Adds multi-family tenancy isolation, per-family sensitivity labelling, full vCIO, table-top exercises, formal AI governance program, incident-response retainer | $9,000 to $18,000 |
The discretion premium. Fusion does not name family-office clients in marketing material, sales decks, press, or case studies. We do not display family-office logos. We sign whatever NDA the family’s counsel writes, including non-naming clauses and clauses prohibiting public reference to the engagement. The discretion is part of the engagement, not a billing line item. We do not charge a premium for it. We do require a clean fit on both sides: families that need a public reference for their MSP are a better fit for a different provider.
For the broader pricing context across regulated-wealth verticals, see our national wealth-management hub.
Family-office IT resources
- National hub: CIRO-Ready IT for Canadian Wealth Management Firms (sibling vertical)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot Oversharing (Copilot governance reference)
- Managed IT Services Toronto (Toronto family-office service hub)
- Managed IT Services Hamilton (GTHA service hub)
- Managed IT Services Vancouver (BC family-office service hub)
- Cybersecurity Services (CISSP-led security)
- AI Services (AI governance and Copilot deployment)
- Canadian Family Offices (industry publication, external)
“We almost wired $840K to a deepfake of our principal. Fusion rebuilt our wire approval flow with Yubikeys and an out-of-band callback to a number our COO carries on paper. Since then we have stopped three impersonation attempts including one voice clone. Our principal can finally take a board call without wondering if it is real.”
Talk to a family-office IT specialist
Thirty-minute discreet walk-through of your office’s stack, the wire-fraud workflow, the AI-governance posture, and what an engagement looks like under a strict non-naming NDA. No pitch deck. No public reference.
