Advice Firms Are Lifting Cyber Spend by a Third — Here’s Where It Should Go

Australian financial advice practices are planning to lift their compliance spend by almost a third — 31% — and a big slice of that is heading into cyber security, according to early data from Adviser Ratings’ latest Landscape Report, reported by Money Management. The driver is ASIC, which has made cyber security failures by licensees a headline enforcement priority and has already shown it will go to court over it — FIIG Securities was hit with a $2.5 million penalty this year, the first time an Australian financial services licensee has been fined specifically for inadequate cyber security.

For wealth management and advice firms, this isn’t abstract. You hold exactly what attackers want: identity documents, tax file numbers, account details, and the client trust that lets a fake “please update my bank details” email slip through. The numbers bear it out. Cyber-insurer research from Numerisk puts the average financial-services cyber claim at $225,000, with business email compromise causing 47% of claims and phishing sitting behind a striking 79% of the industry’s cyber claims.

Here’s our honest take: most of that extra budget should go into unglamorous basics, not a shiny new platform. Enforce multi-factor authentication everywhere — the recent wave of “credential stuffing” attacks on super and wrap platforms worked precisely because reused passwords weren’t backed by MFA. Run real phishing and payment-verification training. Write, and actually test, an incident response plan. And check your cyber insurance limits: small practices typically carry $1–2 million, mid-market firms $5–10 million. Those steps cut far more risk per dollar than another dashboard.

We work with advice and wealth practices across Sydney’s Northern Beaches and Central West NSW, and the pattern is consistent — the firms that get breached rarely lack tools, they lack the boring discipline around access and staff training. If you’d like a plain-English risk assessment sized to your practice, our financial services IT team can help.