When Lucas and I were helping build Jordan Park from the ground up, there wasn’t a decision we made across operations, client service,technology or process that didn’t consider security and fraud.

Coming from Goldman Sachs, we had seen the infrastructure,controls and processes a large institution could put around protecting clientassets.

And yet, even then, we were struck by how much of the industry’s most critical infrastructure still relied on surprisingly archaic processes.

That problem becomes even more pronounced in the RIA andfamily office ecosystem, where firms often operate with far less centralized infrastructure, standardization and institutional scrutiny around securityprotocols than the large wirehouses and banks.

 In many ways, it can still feel like the Wild West.

Years later, that problem hasn’t gone away. It’s becoming more important.

Over the last year, we’ve spoken with RIAs and family offices representing approximately $4.8 trillion in combined assets under management.

You would be hard-pressed to find one that hasn’t dealt with an attempted fraudulent money movement, phishing attack, client impersonation, compromised email account or similar event within the last 6–12 months.

Unfortunately, more of those attempts are successful than our industry likes to talk about.

Meanwhile, the attacks are getting substantially more sophisticated.

AI is making emails easier to impersonate. Documents easier to manipulate. Voices easier to replicate. And bad actors increasingly understand the operational processes firms use to move money.

Yet trillions of dollars of client assets are still protected by workflows heavily dependent on email, PDFs, spreadsheets, phone calls, manual callbacks, clunky and non-standardized CRM templates, and anindividual’s ability to recognize when something doesn’t look right.

We think technology needs to play a much larger role.

It’s one of the reasons we built Atomic.

Our initial mission was to centralize the fragmented workflows surrounding money movement and give client service and operations teams one place to manage the entire process.

But centralization creates something much more powerful than efficiency.

It creates the ability to secure the entire money-movement lifecycle.

When a request originates in one system, gets documented in a spreadsheet, tracked in a CRM template, verified somewhere else, approved through email, entered into a custodian portal, and reconciled somewhere else entirely, no technology layer has enough context to understand the complete transaction.

Atomic changes that.

As firms centralize their money-movement operations within Atomic, we can begin applying security and intelligence across the entire lifecycle—from the moment a request enters the organization until the money reaches its destination.

We’re now investing heavily in building that next layer,while expanding capabilities firms can already see and use inside Atomic today.

The first area is early detection.

We’re developing tooling designed to identify anomalies before a transaction is ever initiated: unusual characteristics surrounding incoming requests, inconsistencies within invoices or payment instructions, unexpected changes to vendor information, changes in historical payment behavior, unexplained account activity, and other signals that warrant additional verification.

Our automated reconciliation capabilities can also helpfirms account for expected incoming and outgoing transactions and surfaceactivity that doesn’t match what the organization expected to occur.

More importantly, we’re working toward a model wheresecurity doesn’t depend entirely on whether an individual employee happens tonotice something suspicious.

Atomic can help identify risk signals and prompt—or require—additional verification when circumstances warrant it.

The second area is securing and validating the transaction itself.

Across capabilities already in the platform and tooling actively under development, we’re building around callback verification and logging, independent authentication, internal and external approvals, biometric authorization, instruction validation, transaction monitoring, and automated follow-up and reconciliation.

But the larger idea is simple:

The infrastructure used to move money shouldn’t just makemoving money easier. It should make stealing it dramatically harder—andaccounting for where it is easier.

 And we believe centralizing money movement is what makesthat possible.

For RIAs and family offices, this isn’t only an operationsissue. Increasingly, we believe it will become part of the value propositionfirms provide their clients.

If I were an ultra-high-net-worth client today, I’d ask mywealth manager one simple question:

How do you protect my money when it moves?

How do you know a request actually came from me? Whathappens if my email is compromised? What happens if someone can replicate myvoice? What happens when payment instructions unexpectedly change? Whattechnology is monitoring all of this? And how do you account for where my moneywent after it moves?

Those questions are going to become increasingly important.

We’re building Atomic so firms have increasinglysophisticated answers.

-Richard

Co-Founder, Atomic

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