Industry IT · Vancouver, BC

Financial Services IT Support Vancouver | BCFSA & FINTRAC Aware

Financial services firms in Vancouver sit on top of some of the most regulated IT in the country. Investment dealers and advisers answer to BCSC, CSA, and CIRO. Mortgage brokers and insurance brokerages answer to BCFSA. MSBs report to FINTRAC. Federally regulated firms answer to OSFI and FCAC on top. Client data segregation, audit trail retention, and privileged access management are not nice-to-haves, they are examination findings if they are missing. Hexafusion supports Lower Mainland financial services firms with examination-ready IT, 15-minute ticket response, and a founder whose PCI DSS Internal Security Assessor background maps directly onto the kind of evidence regulators ask for.

Financial services software we support

High-security infrastructure and privileged access

• Privileged access management. Separated admin accounts, just-in-time privilege, MFA on every privileged session, and PAM tooling for service accounts.
• No local-admin users. Day-to-day accounts are standard users. Administrative work uses separate elevated accounts.
• Conditional access. Block legacy authentication, require compliant devices, and apply geofencing where appropriate.
• Full audit logging. Who accessed which client file, when, from which endpoint. Retained per regulator and firm policy.
• Dell procurement. OptiPlex and Latitude endpoints procured as a Dell authorized partner, imaged to a hardened baseline.
• Network segmentation. Advisor, admin, and guest zones separated. Visitor wifi does not touch client-data resources.
• Endpoint protection. EDR on every workstation with tamper protection and centralised response.

Client data segregation and audit trail

• Role-based access. Advisor, junior advisor, admin, compliance, and partner roles separated.
• Ethical walls between teams. Enforced in document management and CRM rather than by policy alone where firm structure requires it.
• Client-file retention. Retention aligned to BCSC, CIRO, BCFSA, and firm policy requirements, whichever is longer.
• Integrity controls. Records cannot be silently altered; changes are logged with actor, timestamp, and before/after state.
• Secure client exchange. No client financial data by email attachment. Portal, MFA, expiry, and logging.

Privacy, compliance, and records retention

The BC and federal regulatory landscape for financial services is layered. BCFSA regulates insurance, mortgage brokers, credit unions, and real estate in BC. BCSC and the Canadian Securities Administrators regulate securities activity, with CIRO carrying operational requirements for dealers and advisers. OSFI supervises federally regulated financial institutions including banks and federally regulated insurance. FCAC oversees federally regulated consumer-protection obligations. FINTRAC enforces federal anti-money-laundering and record-keeping obligations under the PCMLTFA for reporting entities including MSBs, securities dealers, real estate, and certain insurers. Federal PIPEDA applies to personal information handling, with BC PIPA applying to provincial-jurisdiction activities. We implement and document the IT-side controls these frameworks expect.

• Encryption at rest and in transit. Full-disk encryption, TLS on all remote access, MFA-gated VPN for offsite work.
• Canadian data residency. Microsoft 365 and Azure tenants scoped to Canada Central and Canada East for primary and replica data.
• Breach response. Documented procedures aligned with Office of the Privacy Commissioner guidance at priv.gc.ca, and OSFI Technology and Cyber Security Incident Reporting expectations for federally regulated firms.
• Examination evidence. Backup and restore evidence, access logs, retention schedules, data residency documentation, and incident response records packaged for regulator review.
• Reference. BCFSA at bcfsa.ca. BCSC at bcsc.bc.ca. FINTRAC at fintrac-canafe.gc.ca. OSFI at osfi-bsif.gc.ca.

Workflow-respecting support

Market hours, quarter-end, and commission-run cycles drive our change windows:

• No changes to trading- or advisor-facing systems during market hours without firm approval.
• Quarter-end and year-end change freezes on investment, insurance, and mortgage platforms.
• Pre-cutover staging for every major update. No production-first experiments.
• Before-and-after snapshots so rollback is measured in minutes, not hours.
• Regulator-examination readiness reviews on request.

SLA commitments for Vancouver-area financial services firms

Market hours and client expectations do not wait. Our commitments:

• Initial ticket response within 15 minutes.
• Emergency on-site Vancouver downtown within 1 hour.
• Emergency on-site Burnaby, Richmond, North Vancouver within 1 hour 30 minutes.
• Emergency on-site West Vancouver, New Westminster within 1 hour 45 minutes.
• Emergency on-site Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Delta within 2 hours.
• Emergency on-site Surrey, Langley, White Rock, Maple Ridge within 2 hours 30 minutes.
• Same-day resolution on Professional and Enterprise plans where Hexafusion manages the network, barring force majeure.
• Remote support immediate during the response window.

Why Vancouver financial services firms choose Hexafusion

Founded in 2020 by Alex Barari, a former PCI DSS Internal Security Assessor, Hexafusion is built around exactly the disciplines financial services examinations test. Access control, change management, audit logging, data residency, and incident response are core competencies, not add-ons. Our engineers are Microsoft, Cisco, and CompTIA certified, we procure hardware as a Dell authorized partner, and we are based at 250-997 Seymour St in downtown Vancouver, within the response windows published on this page for most Lower Mainland firms.

We work alongside platform vendors and firm compliance rather than around them. Application questions on Envestnet, Dataphile, Croesus, Finmo, or Applied Epic route to the platform. Our lane is the IT around those platforms: identity, privileged access, device fleet, conditional access, data residency, audit logging, secure client exchange, and the evidence packages a regulator examination or cyber-insurance renewal depends on.

We serve BC financial-services businesses of every size, from a solo mortgage broker or independent financial adviser through to multi-advisor investment offices, insurance brokerages, and small credit unions. Our baseline for encryption, MFA, PAM, audit logging, and Canadian data residency does not change with the size of the firm. Only the scope of the engagement does.

Common financial-services issues we fix

• Shared admin accounts. Replaced with named accounts, MFA, and PAM.
• Legacy authentication still enabled. Disabled, with monitoring for residual use.
• Weak separation between advisor books. DMS and CRM permissions rebuilt.
• Wire-fraud and business-email-compromise attempts. Email authentication, payer verification, and quarterly phishing simulation given the attack volume in financial services.
• Data exfiltration risk on departing advisor. DLP, conditional access, and offboarding runbooks.
• Examination evidence gaps. Backup, restore, access log, and retention evidence produced and maintained.
• US-region cloud services without firm awareness. Audited, flagged, and where appropriate replaced with Canadian-region alternatives.
• Mobile device sprawl. MDM, compliant-device enforcement, and remote wipe.

Frequently Asked Questions

Cyber insurance and examination evidence

Cyber insurers, regulator examiners, and institutional counterparties all now expect financial services firms to produce clean evidence of MFA coverage, privileged access separation, backup immutability, EDR deployment, data residency, phishing training cadence, and incident-response documentation. Firms that cannot produce that evidence pay higher premiums, fail counterparty due diligence, or draw examination findings. We operate the environment to those standards and maintain the evidence as a normal output of the engagement rather than a quarterly scramble: backup test-restore logs, authentication audit exports, PAM session records, access reviews, tabletop notes, and OSFI-aligned incident-reporting runbooks for federally regulated firms.

Related services

Financial-services engagements usually include pieces from Managed IT Vancouver, Cybersecurity Vancouver, Cloud Services Vancouver, Backup & Disaster Recovery, and IT Supplier Vancouver.

Nearby industries we also support

Alongside financial services firms we support law firms, accounting firms, and real estate brokerages. The overlapping regulatory obligations (BCFSA, FINTRAC, BCSC) call for the same disciplined controls.

Reviewed by Alex Barari, Founder, former PCI DSS Internal Security Assessor (ISA).