From: Wealth Briefing

Stephen Little, Reporter in London

The issue of how to handle data protection is one of the most important facing the wealth management industry. High net worth and high-profile individuals increasingly find themselves a choice target for hackers and the challenge of handling important client data is made even more difficult due to regulatory regimes around the world.

As a result of increasing security fears and new compliance measures, firms in the wealth management industry have done much to improve their levels of data security. However, a new US-based survey suggests these new data protection measures could actually be having a negative effect, leading to employees bypassing security to get their job done. Most alarmingly, the study revealed that security breaches may even be going unnoticed.

The survey, conducted by California-based data protection provider Voltage Security, interviewed 300 IT professionals in the San Francisco area and found that half said their job was hindered because they could not get access to all the information they needed.