Paul Walsh Independent Advisory

I provide senior advisory support in three areas: regulatory and litigation exposure for tech companies, regulatory and liability exposure for banks and payment companies, and personal cyber risk for executives, family offices, and high net worth individuals.

For tech companies, child safety, age and identity verification, privacy, and content moderation duties produce conflicting requirements. A single design choice on identity, account verification, defaults, or recommender behaviour can satisfy one regulator and breach another. Legal sees one piece. Policy sees another. Trust and safety sees a third. Leadership ends up with three internally consistent briefings that don't add up to a decision. I sit across all of them and tell leadership where the actual exposure is before a regulator, plaintiff, or select committee defines it for them.

For banks and payment companies, emerging regulations are shifting liability for impersonation, authorised push payment fraud, and phishing scams onto the PSP. Regulators are now asking whether the firm's fraud detection should have caught the deception before the money moved. I help banks identify their exposure, interpret what the new rules actually require, and close the gap between what their controls prove and what regulators now expect.

For principals, the work is personal cyber risk: targeted surveillance, social engineering, and attacks designed for one specific person. The way in is often through the household, staff, family members, or friends.