When Ynez Arce arrived to work at her first single-family office in 2007, there wasn’t much talk about ransomware and spear phishing. At the time, most people had email and were familiar with worms, viruses and hacks sometimes done only for bragging rights in the dark corners of the internet. But those things didn’t seem to happen often, including at family offices.
Several years later, when Arce began working at Iconiq Capital, a private wealth management firm that counts some of the wealthiest tech entrepreneurs as clients and now manages over $100 billion in assets, she was startled by what she learned. Digital threats, in what seemed like a short time, had become much more numerous and grave.
“I got a crash course in security. I became fascinated with how little we knew about it and developed this core question: There are best practices that haven't been developed yet, and there has to be an opportunity to do this better,” Arce told Modus.
After a stint at Iconiq, Arce went on to work at three other single-family offices (she is currently the chief operating officer for one in the Bay Area), and she kept thinking about the cybersecurity conundrum.
Like Arce, Kasey Batterman came to appreciate cybersecurity through his employer, the security firm Concentric Advisors (whose founder began his career at Scotland Yard countering national security threats to the United Kingdom). When he first joined the company, Batterman handled physical security for clients. But as years passed, the importance of mitigating digital threats grew, and so did his interest in it. He eventually led the cybersecurity effort for a Concentric client, one of the wealthiest technology entrepreneurs in Seattle, formalized and headed the company’s cybersecurity offering, and then left it to join a single-family office in San Francisco.
Batterman built a team at the family office he joined and, in 2022, partnered with the principal to found Atro, a cybersecurity startup focused on family offices and other small organizations. The new venture reconnected him with Arce, and now they are working overtime to address problems they’ve encountered throughout their careers and continue to face today.
Last year, Arce and Batterman started The Cyber Foundation, the first nonprofit dedicated to improving cybersecurity standards, education and services specifically for family offices.
The co-founders still have their day jobs and determined that a coalition of people and resources, in the form of the Cyber Foundation, was the best way to make progress. Right now, offices mostly seek out help from a fragmented ecosystem of peers—who may have cybersecurity practices, but not the best ones—or hire consultants just to get started, Arce and Batterman said.
“We want to create a place where people can share information more freely about resources. I've had questions I truly didn't know who to go to for help solving. When somebody knows you're at a family office, they know you've got dollars to spend. And you may have dollars, but you may not have a budget for it. You just need to talk to a professional who's sat in your seat. I have talked to so many family-office leaders who don't feel good about the cybersecurity side of their job because they weren't hired for it,” Arce said.
In the foundation’s 2025 State of Family Office Cybersecurity report, which surveyed 27 offices across the U.S., spending on cybersecurity and confidence levels varied. Nearly half of the respondents were spending less than $100,000 on cybersecurity each year. Meanwhile, 14% spend more than $500,000, and 17% don’t know how much they spend. Just 35% of offices said they had no known incidences of a hack or some other event.
While 65% of offices reported a high level of confidence in their cybersecurity, the report notes that “unfounded confidence can be more dangerous than healthy skepticism.”
In addition to creating and sharing a framework and checklist that offices can use to quickly understand and reduce their risk of being hacked, the foundation is offering offices a 30-minute consultation to assess cybersecurity readiness and identify areas for improvement, and plans to vet vendors and help offices choose the right ones.
The Cyber Foundation has received some funding from the Digital Harbor Foundation, a Baltimore-based nonprofit focused on digital equity, opportunities and solutions. Arce and Batterman are considering other ways to fund and grow the organization.
“On the surface, a nonprofit for family offices might seem a little absurd. But trust is the currency of success in family offices. If we take the harder path and move more deliberately, it's higher trust, and that's how I believe we should be moving,” Batterman said.
“The challenges are real: how do we fund the project, how do we scale with volunteers? I'm a startup guy, and we've had to reorient our understanding of how to succeed within the structure of a nonprofit. But the ability to fill a vacuum, industry-wide, as a nonprofit is much higher than as a consultancy. A consultancy can't scale beyond individual engagements. We can build frameworks that a hundred thousand nonprofits can use without us ever talking to them directly,” he added.
Family offices will remain its core focus, but the foundation’s ultimate goal is to extend its benefits to private foundations, other nonprofits and beyond to small businesses.
“We want to make progress on the core problem, and if being for-profit is an impediment to that, we won't be able to move the needle the way we need to. I am not a salesperson; I want to solve problems,” Arce said. “A 501(c)(3) is meant to provide a public service. If family offices—so well-funded, so well-resourced, with such bright people—cannot properly identify and address their own risk, what hope does anybody else have?”
You quit your job at a hedge fund in 2010 to start Santangel's Review. Why?
I noticed a gap in the market that I couldn't stop thinking about: the best investors are sometimes the ones least focused on raising capital, meaning they end up running small, under-the-radar funds that allocators never hear about.
At the same time, family offices, endowments, and foundations are drowning in pitches from funds that are often better at marketing than investing. I started Santangel's Review to bridge that divide and help surface genuine talent that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Tell me more about the lesser-known asset managers you work with.
They have top-tier track records but are off the beaten path. They rely on their own rigorous research rather than following the crowd, which is precisely what makes them outstanding and sometimes deeply contrarian. Our bar for inclusion is high, and we're proud that several managers who were unknown when they first presented with us have since become widely recognized in the industry.
Why are family offices among the allocators interested in Santangel’s events?
Family offices are constantly searching for the best investing talent but are bombarded by fund pitches. Our Roundtables help them by doing the vetting up front. Every manager featured has been rigorously evaluated, so allocators know the quality is already there.
Everyone wants to engage meaningfully with one another, so the format includes eight one-on-one meetings, an idea presentation session, and other networking opportunities. Our one-day events are high-signal and efficient.
When is the next event?
Our next roundtable is Thursday, May 7, in New York City.
All attendance is by invitation only. If any family office or institutional allocator wants to learn more or join, they can email me at sfriedman@santangels.com or visit the link below.
More News
- In Modus last week: A Lesson for Single-Family Offices From Wealth Management Firms: Discipline.
- Thomas Nicholson has joined Aleta as vice president of North America, the company announced this week. Nicholson was previously the director of family office solutions at Asora, another investment software company. He’s also worked at a single-family office and at Attinger, an investment consultant to private and institutional investors.
“Thomas has felt first-hand the cost of running multi-entity wealth on spreadsheets and tools that were never built for the job. He knows where they fail, what gets lost, and what families actually need to run well. That understanding is exactly why he's the right person for this role," Ken Gamskjaer, CEO and co-founder of Aleta, said. - The Arbitrage Trade That’s Making Private-Credit Withdrawals Worse.
- The Billionaire Trying to Build the ‘Next Great Washington Newsroom’.
- The hedge-fund founder leveraging long naps and jogging to beat the market.
- Speaking of Iconiq Capital, the private wealth manager continues to expand its venture-investing influence and is increasingly going toe-to-toe with established VC firms. That might have helped attract new investors, including Tom Cruise, Pharrell Williams and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, making its client list even flashier, Bloomberg reported this week.
- Investor Advocates Ask FASB to Reconsider Guidance on Secondaries.
- The 2026 TPI Study of the Philanthropic Conversation is out. Here’s an interesting part: “Despite 95% of HNW clients reporting their advisors are knowledgeable about philanthropy, only 61% of HNW clients report high satisfaction with their philanthropic discussions.” The satisfaction rate is probably higher at family offices, but that’s still worth keeping in mind.
- Who Would Buy This $3 Million Golden Apple at Sotheby’s? I don’t know, but remember that someone paid $12.1 at auction for a solid gold commode last year.
- The New York Art World Was Once Just a Small Number of Unusual People. All the best things start this way and end up ruined…
How does Integris Aviation Consultancy help clients?
We turned a real estate developer's $1 million annual loss into $5 million of net revenue with an aircraft lease.
A family office came to us to improve the safety of their aviation program. We did that—and saved the family $3 million over ten years by establishing a stand-alone flight department.
For over a decade, we've helped C-suite executives, family offices, and corporate flight departments worldwide navigate the complexities of private aircraft sales, acquisitions, and more. Let us help you.
Reach out to Founder David Clark to learn more: david@integrisaviation.com
Jobs
- Soros Fund Management is hiring a COO of investments. Compensation includes a $300 salary and benefits.
- Recruiter Liz Cross is helping a family office in the New York/Connecticut area find a CFO. This is a senior role for someone with 10-20 years of experience. Come correct and the $500,000 salary could be yours.
- Aleta is hiring an AI innovation lead to “build and lead a dedicated AI lab” at their headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark.
Other Stuff
- Follow the Modus LinkedIn. 2,000+ people do because it only shares worthwhile updates 1-3 times per week.
- What makes a good news tip? High-profile executives departing or accepting new jobs; trends that aren’t getting talked about; and, of course, seemingly nefarious people and things that offices should be aware of.
To share information in confidence, reply to this email or message me on Signal (+1 330-962-6441) using a personal device that your employer cannot access. - Want to sponsor Modus? Fill out this form to get the sales deck.
I'll be...
- Ordering an absurd amount of Chinese takeout tonight. It’s not Steph’s favorite, so I do this every time she’s out of town. Please don’t message me about the sodium levels; I don’t care. You want to help? Send me news tips!
- Returning to Canyon Coffee for other treats. The hot bean water was weak for my taste. But the cheddar biscuit was excellent. I’m going back tomorrow for the morning bun. We’ll see if that makes me a believer.
- At the 2026 Bullish Consumer/LP Summit on Thursday, where I’m doing a fireside chat about family offices, PE, and investments in consumer goods companies with the perfect single-family-office interviewee. House is going to be packed. Space is limited now, but you can request to attend here.
