Executive summary
Wealth environments join advisors, assistants, supervisors, operations, clients, vendors, service accounts, APIs, data feeds, cloud workloads, custody and portfolio platforms, documents, and communications. Network location alone cannot establish whether an interaction is legitimate or appropriate.
A verifiable zero-trust design maps critical wealth services and data to identities, access policy, segmentation, authentication, authorization, monitoring, response, recovery, testing, and evidence. It reduces implicit trust while protecting client experience and operating continuity.
Protect the critical service
Identify the client and business outcome, sensitive data, transactions, workflows, applications, interfaces, administrators, providers, and recovery dependencies. Set access and resilience requirements by impact.
Use contextual policy
Evaluate role, relationship, device, location, channel, data sensitivity, action, transaction risk, time, behavior, and authentication strength. Define when to allow, limit, challenge, review, block, or escalate.
Control privileged and machine access
Inventory administrators, service accounts, workloads, APIs, keys, secrets, certificates, and emergency identities. Govern ownership, vaulting, rotation, elevation, session evidence, and unused access.
Monitor and test decisions
Connect identity, entitlement, device, session, data, application, transaction, and case signals. Test policy coverage, exceptions, revocation, segmentation, recovery, vendor access, and evidence retention.
What auditors should be able to verify
- Critical services, data, identities, and access paths are inventoried
- Policy decisions have accountable owners and approved logic
- Privileges and exceptions are time-bound and reviewable
- Monitoring connects access to business and transaction context
- Tests demonstrate prevention, detection, containment, recovery, and remediation
From guidance to operating capability
Zero trust is an operating model, not a product label. It succeeds when access decisions remain proportional, serviceable, measurable, resilient, and understandable to the people responsible for client protection and oversight.
Cicrim helps banks connect wealth architecture, identity, security, data, vendors, monitoring, response, resilience, control testing, and evidence.
