“If there’s a cybercriminal out there that’s targeting you, you want to make them work hard for the information,” said Lorne Maltenfort of Wells Fargo.
The Great Wealth Transfer will see vast amounts of wealth change hands but also means that advisors and their clients should beware opportunistic cybercriminals, according to Lorne Maltenfort, private wealth planning director at Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management.
“It’s really thinking about the Great Wealth Transfer and the amount of money that’s going to be getting to the next generation, rethinking privacy and cybersecurity as an enterprise risk,” he told InvestmentNews. “You need to sort of pressure test where your vulnerabilities are from a privacy and cybersecurity perspective and then be able to triage them.”
“From a privacy perspective, it’s not about becoming invisible in today’s world, it’s about controlling what information is out there,” he added.
Like all industries, cybersecurity is a top priority in the financial advisory space – earlier this year, for example, large RIAs and wealth management firms were targeted in a wave of cyberattacks.
This is also happening against the backdrop of the Great Wealth Transfer, which marks a massive intergenerational shift in wealth dynamics – in 2024 Cerulli Associates projected that $124 trillion in wealth will be transferred through 2048. Within that number, nearly $100 trillion will be transferred from Baby Boomers and older generations, according to Cerulli, representing 81% of all transfers.
While this shift represents a significant target area for the bad guys, Maltenfort notes that a cybercriminal can only attack someone if they know what they are attacking. “That’s why we’re so keen on privacy,” he said, adding that people need to think, for example, about how assets are titled. “If you set up a revokable trust, a best practice is not to name the trust your name, which is something often people have done for the past 20, 30 years.”
The Wells Fargo private wealth planning director also discussed creating additional levels of privacy around how assets are owned within a trust, such as LLCs and legal entities that own the assets.
“If there’s a cybercriminal out there that’s targeting you, you want to make them work hard for the information,” he said. “You don’t want to be a low-hanging fruit in terms of someone trying to seek information and target you.”
Within a trust, Wells Fargo recommends segmenting responsibilities, with an investment trustee responsible for investments, a distribution trustee responsible for making distributions, and someone serving as a “trust protector” who can arbitrate disputes within the trust. “If there’s a dispute, we’re not going public, the trust protector is arbitrating the dispute, and in effect, keeping it completely private,” said Maltenfort.
And there is plenty of wealth to keep private. U.S. household net worth hit a record $184.1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to data released last month by the Federal Reserve. The central bank said that, during the fourth quarter, modest gains on corporate equity assets more than offset a decline in the value of real estate. Unsurprisingly, the $184.1 trillion number was hailed as “positive news” for advisors.
But vigilance is key, with Maltenfort warning that cybercriminals are monitoring social media for clues about potential wealthy marks. “Locations … are you publicizing where you’re in school? Are you publicizing a picture of your plane with the tail number?” he said. “We help families create governance, not to be restrictive, but to be reasonable and get buy in, particularly from digital natives, so the younger generation, because privacy is only as good as its weakest link.”
Philanthropy is another area that can be tightened, according to Maltenfort. A private foundation, for example, could be harnessed by clients that are less concerned about privacy, whereas a donor advised fund offers flexibility around anonymity. “It’s a ‘lever’ that you turn on and off – you can give anonymously or in the name of your fund,” he said.
In its wealth transfer forecast, Cerulli projects that, of the $124 trillion transferred through 2048, $105 trillion is expected to flow to heirs, while $18 trillion will go to charity.
Maltenfort said that Wells Fargo has “all the resources available” to tackle clients’ cybersecurity and privacy challenges. “You can’t outgrow us, regardless of wealth, we can solve for the pain points on your balance sheet,” he added.
