Dr. Federico Ferrari.
President and co-founder. FACS-certified behavioral analyst. His Predisposition Mapping is validated on 300+ real cases.
For U/HNW Individuals, families and the advisors that serve them
The families that last are the ones that see it coming.
Every U/HNW Individual, media personality or athlete is exposed through the people closest to them.
You trust your advisors and staff, often rightly so, but you should be ready for the day that trust stops holding.
This paper shows what the risk looks like, and the levers to pull to keep it to a minimum.
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Why exposure is hard to see from the inside
You buckle up every time you drive, because you've seen crashes happen, but you don't cover yourself enough in your private and personal life, because you can't picture what could possibly go wrong.
Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called it WYSIATI: "what you see is all there is". We judge how exposed we are only by the risks we can already picture. It works on everyone, experts included: none of us is immune.
The people who run your life are the hardest exposure to picture: nothing about them looks like one. Being ready starts with what they can reach.
What the closest people can reach
Where you keep your money, the amounts, and how to access it.
Current legal disputes, and anything that could turn into a reputational issue.
The schedule and whereabouts of you and your family.
Your addresses, your properties, your phonebook.
Each one is in the hands of someone you trust.
The better known you are, the more each of these is worth to someone else. A minor car accident, a bet at the sportsbook, a doctor's appointment: for most people they stay private. For you, they're news.
03
Nobody could have seen it coming, right?
Picture this. An illustrative case from the paper.
Eleanor* joined the family office twelve years ago. She knows every account, every vendor, every private matter that crosses the family's desk, down to the children's school fees and the weeks the house stands empty.
Eighteen months ago her father was diagnosed, and the treatments are expensive. Her husband lost his job last year. The idea of becoming the one who asks for help feels worse to her than the problem.
So, quietly, she has begun taking on more autonomy over accounts and payments. "Just in case." The payments she enters are payments she also approves.
The half-days off without explanation.
The office door closed when it had never been before.
The informal Thursday morning coffee she had quietly stopped attending.
The shift from "we" to "the team".
Each one innocuous on its own, and none of them evidence of anything. Read together, and early, they were a conversation waiting to happen.
Swap the family office for an agent's team, a production office or the staff of a house: the pattern doesn't change.
04
Aren't you already covered?
Most people with something worth taking already have protection in place. Each piece sees part of the picture.
- A background check sees who they were the day you hired them.
- An NDA stops people who fear the consequences. Pressure changes that.
- An audit finds the payment after it has left.
- Security watches the gate and the street. Eleanor was already inside.
- Your instinct sees what it has always seen.
Nobody here has failed: not you, not your staff, not your advisors. Each tool does the job it was built for. The gap is the system around the people.
With money, part of it sometimes comes back. With information, safety and reputation, once something goes wrong there is almost no way to fully recover.
05
Blind trust sweeps the risk under the rug.
Nobody decides overnight. Watch Eleanor's case build up, one step at a time.
1
Trust and access
Twelve years in, she is the person the whole family trusts the most, and she knows every account.
2
Opportunity
Her father is diagnosed. The treatments are expensive.
3
Opportunity
Her husband loses his job.
4
Opportunity
The narrative "I need this more than they do" starts building.
5
Access
She takes over more of the payments. "Just in case."
6
Visibility
The payments she enters are payments she also approves. Nobody could read them back.
Trust your people. Then build the system that keeps trust safe.
Tick what you would put in place, and watch which step each one takes out.
None of them requires suspecting anyone.
With all of it in place, it becomes almost impossible for this to happen, whoever is involved. The paper shows you where to start.
Get the paperEleanor's case: how close it gets
Risk
Critical level
The day she joins
Today
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2
3
4
5
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(Trust+Access+Opportunity) −Visibility=Risk
Trust
the standing a person already has.
Access
what their role lets them reach.
Opportunity
the pressure and the occasion that together make acting now look possible.
Visibility
the only term that subtracts. A trail someone could read back.
Three of the four could not have been set any lower without stopping her from doing her job. The fourth was free, and nobody bought it.
JACA, from Gavin de Becker.
- Justification
- Alternatives
- Consequences
- Ability
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What changes when you're ready
You know who can reach what, and what it would cost you if it got out.
When something shifts in someone's life, you hear about it while it's still a conversation.
Trust stays where it is. It just stops carrying the whole weight.
The questions people ask first
Won't this make me suspicious of my own people?
None of the levers requires suspecting anyone. They protect the people who work for you too: nobody runs out of options in silence.
I already have a family office, a manager, a security team.
Then you already have the people to put this in place. Preventing these things to happen is not always in their job description, but nonetheless it's a matter that deeply impacts you.
Do I really need this?
We all tend to underestimate the risks we haven't seen happen. When the consequences can't be undone, the time to act is before.
07
For family office leaders, advisors, agents and managers
You're in the best position to put this in place.
You see the payments, the access and the people every day.
That makes you the natural place for these levers to live, and the right voice to bring them to the people you serve and everyone around them.
Read it first, then take it to them.
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Step one, in fifteen minutes
Five checks you can run yourself, starting this week.
And Eleanor's case, read through both frameworks.
Andrea "Dino" Di Noia.
Managing Partner and co-founder of Delphyros. Engineer, Lean Six Sigma certified, AI specialist.
09
Who wrote it
Enterprise Members of the UHNW Institute, where our first paper, Know Who to Trust, is part of the resource library.-
$2B+aggregate client net worth across three countries.300+cases analyzed.
JACA comes from Gavin de Becker, author of The Gift of Fear.
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Now you know where to start.
The levers work whether you're in the room or not.
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Keep the levers working
The paper gives you the levers. Keeping them working around every person close to you, year after year, is what we do.
Already have a situation in mind? If you already have one, give us that instead. We need nothing beyond what it takes to answer it: a narrow perimeter, a controlled setting, and no reason to let us into the rest of the house.