Wealth Management IT Support in Chicago, IL
Northern Trust, founded in Chicago in 1889, still has its headquarters at 50 South LaSalle Street, and the city's independent advisers, multi-family offices and breakaway teams work from Loop towers, River North suites and suburban offices around it. Each one holds client data the SEC expects it to protect. NetSys runs IT and cybersecurity for wealth management firms remotely from Brooklyn.
The short answer
NetSys provides IT support and cybersecurity for wealth management firms and RIAs in Chicago: a help desk for advisers and operations staff, ThreatDown managed detection and response, Microsoft 365 with Conditional Access, retention and archiving for email and Teams, Keeper for shared credentials, Barracuda email protection and tested backups, plus the written incident response program that amended Regulation S-P requires. Service is remote and cloud-based, with no engineers sent on site in Chicago. The help desk is staffed 3 a.m. to 10 p.m. Central every day, well before the opening bell, and monitoring runs 24/7. Pricing is per user per month after an assessment.
Work we have done for wealth management clients
- Wealth management
RIA firm
Barracuda email protection for 117 licensed users, email archiving, cybersecurity monitoring, and account access management.
Client names are withheld. These examples were chosen for the work involved, not for where the client is, so none is presented as a Chicago client.
What changes for a wealth management firm in Chicago
Chicago is one of the country's financial centers, and its advisory firms work alongside the institutions that made it one. LaSalle Street holds Northern Trust's headquarters and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, CME Group and Cboe are headquartered in the city, and so is Morningstar. Around them, wealth management takes many shapes: SEC-registered RIAs with a few hundred households, dually registered teams that left a wirehouse, multi-family offices serving business owners, and smaller advisers registered with the Illinois Securities Department rather than the SEC. Clients are spread from the Gold Coast to the North Shore and the western suburbs, and many reach their adviser by email, text or video call rather than in a downtown conference room. That shapes the IT. Money movement requests arrive by email and phone, custodian and portfolio-reporting platforms run in the cloud, client documents travel through portals, and every message about the business is a record the firm has to keep.
Remote support for advisers before the opening bell
The help desk opens at 3 a.m. Central, so an adviser preparing for the 8:30 a.m. market open, or an operations team reconciling overnight activity, has an engineer available long before the office fills. Every laptop is enrolled in Intune and Windows Autopilot, encrypted and checked by Conditional Access before it can reach Microsoft 365, the custodian portal or the CRM. Advisers who travel sign in under the same policy, and an attempt from an unexpected country is blocked and reviewed. NetSys does not send engineers to Chicago offices; new hardware ships configured to the adviser's home or office, and your staff connect the conference-room display or printer while an engineer finishes the setup remotely. Severe problems, such as a locked-out trading desk, ransomware or email down, go straight to your dedicated engineer.
Regulation S-P, vendor oversight and the incident response program
The 2024 amendments to Regulation S-P changed what an adviser's IT has to produce. A covered firm now needs a written incident response program that can detect, respond to and recover from unauthorized access to customer information, and it must be able to tell whether sensitive customer information was reached, because affected individuals must generally be notified within 30 days. That depends on logs. We keep Microsoft 365 audit logging switched on and retained, centralize ThreatDown and sign-in alerts, and document who can reach the CRM, the portfolio-reporting platform and client folders. The rule also requires oversight of service providers, including notice to the firm within 72 hours of a breach involving customer information. We keep the vendor inventory in IT Glue, collect each provider's security terms and help you record what every provider has agreed to.
Wire fraud, impersonation and off-channel messages
The attack advisers see most often is not ransomware but a convincing request to move money. A client's email account is taken over, or an attacker registers a look-alike domain, and a wire instruction arrives that reads exactly like the client. We close the openings: Barracuda screens impersonation and look-alike domains, DMARC on your own domain reduces spoofing, and KnowBe4 exercises train staff on the real pattern. The control that matters most is procedural, so we help write a rule that any new or changed payment instruction is confirmed by a call to a number already on file. Communications carry their own risk. On January 13, 2025 the SEC announced charges against nine investment advisers and three broker-dealers in its sweep of business conducted over text and messaging apps. We configure retention for email and Teams, manage company phones through Intune and connect an archiving service for text messages where advisers text clients.
Everything else about how we serve the area, including coverage, how support is delivered and the honest answer about where our office is, lives on our page for managed IT services in Chicago.
Rules Chicago wealth managers answer to
SEC Regulation S-P, as amended in 2024
The SEC adopted the amendments on May 16, 2024. Larger entities had to comply by December 3, 2025 and smaller entities, which for advisers means under $1.5 billion in assets under management, by June 3, 2026, so both dates have passed. Covered firms need written incident response policies, notice to affected individuals as soon as practicable and no later than 30 days after becoming aware of an incident involving sensitive customer information, and service-provider oversight that includes notice within 72 hours of a breach.
Books and records, federal and state
SEC-registered advisers keep required books and records under Rule 204-2 of the Advisers Act, generally for five years, the first two in an appropriate office. Advisers registered with the Illinois Secretary of State follow 14 Ill. Adm. Code 130.845, which requires originals of communications received and copies of communications sent relating to the business to be preserved for at least three years, the first two in an easily accessible place. For IT that means retention policies in Microsoft 365, an archive for each approved messaging channel and restores that prove the records can be produced.
Illinois PIPA and the GLBA safe harbor
The Personal Information Protection Act (815 ILCS 530) covers a name combined with a Social Security number or a financial account number and its access code, and a username or email address combined with a password. A firm that complies with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley safeguards standards, which the SEC applies to its registrants through Regulation S-P, is deemed to meet the Act's data-security section, but the notice duties still apply: residents must be told without unreasonable delay, and a breach requiring notice to more than 500 residents must also be reported to the Attorney General. This is general information, not legal advice.
This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm your obligations with counsel.
Wealth Management Firms in Chicago: FAQs
Who provides IT support for wealth management firms in Chicago?
NetSys does, remotely from its only office, in Brooklyn, NY, where it has run IT since 1998. For an advisory firm that means the help desk, devices, Microsoft 365, ThreatDown security, email protection, archiving, backups and the documentation an SEC or state examiner asks for, under one month-to-month agreement. You get an account manager with a real cell number, and our engineers hold Cisco and Microsoft certifications. NetSys has no Chicago office, and nothing in the service depends on one.
How does IT support work for Chicago wealth management firms?
Everything is handled remotely. Advisers and operations staff reach the help desk by phone, email or Teams from 3 a.m. to 10 p.m. Central seven days a week, monitoring and emergency response cover the rest of the day, and a critical issue gets a phone response within ten minutes and a remote response within thirty. Laptops ship configured through Windows Autopilot to the office or an adviser's home. NetSys does not send engineers on site in Chicago, so your staff connect any new equipment while an engineer guides them.
What does IT support cost for a wealth management firm in Chicago?
NetSys prices IT support per user per month after an assessment and does not publish a rate. For an advisory firm the figure moves with the number of users and devices, the platforms we support (CRM, portfolio reporting, financial planning, custodian portals), the archiving and retention the firm needs, how much Regulation S-P documentation must be built, and whether an operations person keeps some IT duties. One-time projects, such as moving a file server to SharePoint or setting up a new office, are quoted after scoping. Agreements run month to month.
How do you help Chicago RIAs meet the amended Regulation S-P?
We build the technical half of the program and leave the legal decisions with your chief compliance officer. That means an inventory of where customer information lives, access by role, multifactor sign-in, encryption, logging retained long enough to investigate, a written incident response runbook with named contacts, and a test of it at least once a year. We also gather security terms from your service providers and track their notice commitments. When an incident happens, our engineers produce the timeline and evidence your counsel needs to decide whether, and whom, to notify.
Do you support our CRM, portfolio-reporting and custodian platforms?
Yes, in the way a managed IT provider should: we support the devices, browsers, identity and network those platforms rely on, and we work with each vendor on problems inside their product. We connect single sign-on where the platform allows it, enforce multifactor sign-in, restrict access by role, remove access the day someone leaves, and keep support contacts and account details in IT Glue. When a custodian portal or reporting platform misbehaves before a client meeting, our engineer opens the case and stays on it. We do not claim certification on any vendor's product.
Can our advisers text clients?
Only through a channel the firm captures and can produce for an examiner. The SEC's off-channel communications cases turned on business conversations held in personal text and messaging apps that firms did not preserve. We give firms a workable setup: company phones managed in Intune, Teams chat retained in Microsoft 365, and an archiving service that captures text messages on an approved number. Then we help your compliance officer write the policy and confirm that unapproved apps cannot reach client data on managed devices.
Services behind this work
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