Houston Financial Services IT Support, Built for Compliance
Financial services IT in Houston is managed IT support and cybersecurity for firms that answer to the SEC, FINRA, bank examiners, or the FTC Safeguards Rule, from RIAs and broker-dealers to community banks, CPA firms, and energy-trading desks. Uprite runs it from Houston at a published $138 per user per month, as part of our IT services for financial firms in Texas.
IT support and cybersecurity for Houston RIAs, broker-dealers, community banks, credit unions, CPA firms, and energy-finance desks, mapped to Reg S-P, FINRA, FFIEC, and FTC Safeguards requirements and backed by a 120-day guarantee.
Get a Free Compliance AssessmentNo obligation. You keep the gap report either way.Since 1999 | MSP 501 7x Consecutive | SOC 2 Type 1 Certified (2023) | 120-Day Satisfaction Guarantee
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Awards & Industry Recognition
The Regulatory Reality
Why Houston Financial Firms Can’t Treat IT as an Afterthought
When did your last FINRA audit feel routine?
For a lot of Houston firms, it didn’t. Someone in operations exported user lists from 3 systems by hand. Someone else hunted for proof that MFA covered the laptop a departed advisor never returned. The compliance officer lost 2 days rebuilding an audit trail that should have built itself.
Houston’s financial sector looks like its economy. Commodity and energy trading desks, energy-focused private equity, project-finance lenders, and the wealth managers who serve energy executives work alongside community banks, credit unions, insurance agencies, and CPA firms. Nearly all of them are small. Census counts 9,720 finance and insurance locations across the 10-county metro, and 9,018 of them, or 92.8%, employ fewer than 20 people, against 84.2% of all Houston business locations (County Business Patterns, 2023).
That’s good for clients who want a 12-person firm that knows their name. It’s also good for attackers.
A 12-person office holds the same client data, wire instructions, and portfolio logins as a 400-person one, and it answers to the same regulators. In our experience, few have a full-time IT person, and almost none has a security officer. Accounting firms carry their own version of that exposure, and our guide to the best IT support for CPAs in Houston covers what to look for.
If your managed IT services in Houston provider can’t explain how their controls map to FINRA Rule 3110 or SEC Reg S-P, you don’t have an IT partner.
You have a help desk and an invoice.
Who Examines Your Houston Firm, and How Fast You Have to Report
The rulebook changes with the license on the door, and so does the clock that starts when something goes wrong.
| Firm type | Houston metro locations | Under 20 employees | Who examines you | Incident clock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Banks | 1,532 | 88% | FDIC, OCC, or Federal Reserve, plus the Texas Department of Banking for state charters | Federal regulator within 36 hours of determining a notification incident occurred |
| Credit unions | 307 | 89% | NCUA, plus the Texas Credit Union Department for state charters | NCUA within 72 hours of reasonably believing a reportable cyber incident occurred |
| Broker-dealers and securities firms | 480 | 87% | FINRA and the SEC | Customers within 30 days under Reg S-P, and your vendor contracts must require 72-hour breach notice |
| RIAs and wealth managers | 1,236 | 96% | The SEC, or the Texas State Securities Board for smaller advisers | Reg S-P if SEC-registered, or the FTC Safeguards Rule notice if state-registered |
| Mortgage lenders and loan brokers | 475 | 91% | The FTC under the Safeguards Rule, plus the Texas Department of Savings and Mortgage Lending | FTC within 30 days once 500 or more consumers are affected |
| CPA offices and tax preparers | 1,662 | 95% | The FTC under the Safeguards Rule, and the IRS | FTC within 30 days at 500 or more consumers, and the IRS as soon as data theft is found |
| Insurance agencies and brokers | 2,805 | 96% | Texas Department of Insurance | Texas breach law, below |
| Every firm above | Texas law | Texas Attorney General | Affected Texans within 60 days, and the Attorney General within 30 days when 250 or more are affected | |
Locations are establishments with paid employees, Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metro, 10 counties, from the US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023. The clocks come from 12 CFR 304.23, 12 CFR 748.1, 17 CFR 248.30, 16 CFR 314.4, and Texas Business and Commerce Code 521.053.
Nearly every office in that table is small enough to share one IT person, if it has one at all. The clock doesn’t care. When an examiner asks what happened, the answer has to come from logs, backups, and access records that existed before the incident, which is why we build those first.
Banking here is mostly run from somewhere else. Only 34 FDIC-insured banks are headquartered in the Houston metro, none with $10 billion or more in assets, and about 4 in 5 bank offices in the metro belong to banks based outside it (FDIC BankFind, June 2026). Credit unions are the reverse. Of the credit union locations here, 84% are run by credit unions headquartered in the Houston area, and 45 of the 75 local credit unions hold less than $100 million in assets (NCUA call report data). Those small institutions carry the same 72-hour rule with a fraction of a big bank’s staff.
San Antonio’s market is built differently, around USAA and Frost, and our page on IT services for financial firms in San Antonio covers it. Pricing is a separate question. A per-user rate covers the controls, but GLBA compliance IT cost in Texas also turns on how much documentation your examiner expects to see.
Compliance Depth
Compliance That Doesn’t Depend on One Person
Here’s a pattern we see across financial firms in the Houston area.
In a 10-to-40-person firm, compliance usually lands on one person. It might be the CCO. It might be an office manager who inherited it along with the server closet. Whoever it is also handles vendors, onboarding, payroll questions, and the copier lease, and the firm’s whole regulatory posture rides on their calendar.
That isn’t a knock on them. It’s what a 25-person advisory firm on Post Oak or a small broker-dealer downtown can staff.
Done properly, financial services IT means the documentation, access controls, and audit trails your examiner expects come out of the systems on their own, whether that examiner works for FINRA, the SEC, the FDIC, or the FTC. Not as an afterthought. As a default.
FINRA’s 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report, published in December 2025, says the regulator has seen an increase in the reporting of cyberattacks and outages at firms’ third-party vendors. One provider’s attack or outage, the report adds, could reach a large number of member firms at once.
Put plainly, your IT provider is now part of your compliance surface. Examiners want to know who runs your systems, not just which systems you run, and the amended Reg S-P put that in writing with vendor oversight and a 72-hour breach notice you have to require.
In May 2023, an independent accounting firm examined Uprite’s controls against the SOC 2 security criteria and issued a Type 1 opinion. That’s a point-in-time report, and we say so. Your examiner gets it with the date on the cover, plus a walkthrough of how those same controls run in your environment today. Ask your current provider for theirs. Then check the date.
What That Looks Like in Practice
Role-Mapped Access Controls
Access controls mapped to your firm’s role hierarchy, not generic admin and user buckets.
MFA Everywhere
Multi-factor authentication enforced across every endpoint, every cloud application, and every remote session.
Audit Trail Logging
Logging that captures who accessed what, when, and from where, retained and reviewable on demand.
Encryption at Rest and in Transit
Client PII, financial records, and portfolio data encrypted across every system in your environment.
Documented Change Management
Every system modification has a paper trail, so your compliance file stays clean between exams.
Quarterly Access Reviews
Reviews that actually happen on schedule, not the week before an examiner arrives.
One pattern we notice. Firms feel most compliant the week after an exam and least compliant 6 weeks before the next one. Compliance that runs all year flattens that curve. Either the evidence is already in the file when the exam letter arrives, or your team spends its nights building it. The gaps that show up most often are in our list of IT compliance mistakes Houston financial firms make.
The Risk
Financial Services Cybersecurity for a $6.29M Risk
The numbers aren’t theoretical.
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2026 puts the average financial-sector breach at $6.29 million, up from $5.56 million a year earlier and behind only healthcare. And it’s rising. The study covered 602 breached organizations, and across all of them it took an average of 247 days to identify and contain a breach.
Ransom is its own line. Sophos surveyed 369 financial firms hit by ransomware for its 2025 report and found an average recovery bill of $1.74 million before any ransom, with a median ransom demand of $3 million, the highest of any industry it studied.
A spoofed email from a client in Kingwood. A reused advisor password. Closing funds wired on instructions nobody called back to confirm. Business email compromise cost US victims more than $3 billion in 2025, and Texans reported $1.83 billion in cybercrime losses, second only to California, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center.
So the security stack starts where financial firms actually get hit, which is the inbox, the endpoint, and the login. It’s the same program behind our cybersecurity services in Houston, tuned for regulated firms.
Phishing and Email Compromise Defense
Wire fraud starts in the inbox. We filter mail, enforce SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on your domain, and run phishing drills built around fake custodian and closing-statement emails.
Endpoint Detection and Response
Every laptop and server that touches client data runs endpoint detection that watches behavior, not just file signatures, and cuts a machine off the network once it starts encrypting shares.
Dark Web Monitoring
We watch breach dumps for your domain and your staff’s addresses. When an advisor’s password turns up for sale, it gets reset before anyone tries it.
Encrypted Backup and Tested Recovery
Servers back up every hour, and nightly copies roll back 31 days. We test restores every quarter. That cadence is written into our fully managed plan. If ransomware lands, client files, email, and shared drives come back from copies kept off the main network, and nobody has to negotiate.
Operational Uptime
IT That Doesn’t Go Down During Quarter-End
Quarter-end at a financial firm is a different animal than quarter-end at a marketing agency. Reports are running. Custodian portals are pulling data. Advisors are booked solid with client reviews. On the energy-finance side, trading desks and commodity risk teams are marking positions and reconciling before the close.
Lose the network at 2 PM on the last trading day of a quarter and every minute has a dollar figure attached.
Our monitoring runs 24/7, and an after-hours alert reaches a technician, not a voicemail box. Houston adds weather. Hurricane Beryl cut power to about 2.26 million CenterPoint customers in July 2024 (Texas Tribune), so continuity plans here assume the office goes dark while the firm keeps working. For broker-dealers that plan isn’t optional, because FINRA Rule 4370 requires a written business continuity plan covering data backup and recovery, alternate communications, and alternate locations for staff.
What We Support for Houston Financial Firms
Portfolio Management Platforms
Orion, Black Diamond, Addepar, Tamarac, and Morningstar, configured for uptime and the specific network demands these systems create.
Custodian Portal Connectivity
Schwab, Fidelity, Pershing, and firms navigating custodian platform transitions.
Trading and Market-Data Connectivity
Low-latency, resilient links for firms running Bloomberg, trading platforms, and commodity or energy market-data feeds where a dropped session carries a dollar cost.
Email Archiving and Client Portals
Smarsh or Global Relay archiving connectors, monitored so every mailbox and message keeps landing in the archive, plus secure document exchange and e-signature for client paperwork.
Microsoft 365 and Azure
Environments configured with financial-grade security baselines, not consumer defaults.
Multi-Office Connectivity
Across Houston locations, satellite offices, and remote advisors working from home.
And day to day?
A preparer’s laptop won’t boot 20 minutes before a client signs a return. The help desk gets a loaner online with their profile restored. The meeting starts on time. A custodian feed stops updating in the middle of a rebalance. We trace the connection, work it with the custodian’s support team, and log the fix for your compliance file.
Those aren’t hypothetical scenarios. They’re Tuesday.
CPA and Accounting Firms
IT Support for Houston CPA and Accounting Firms
Uprite supports Houston CPA and accounting firms at the same published $138 per user per month, on Lacerte, ProSeries, UltraTax CS, CCH Axcess, Drake, QuickBooks, and Microsoft 365, with the written security plan, MFA, and encryption the FTC Safeguards Rule expects.
The firms are small. They’re also consolidating. The Houston metro has 993 CPA offices, and 930 of them employ fewer than 20 people. Tax preparation is smaller still, with 669 offices and not one at 100 employees or more (Census, 2023). In Harris County the office count and the headcount are moving in opposite directions. CPA offices fell 5.2% between 2019 and 2025 while CPA jobs rose 4.6%, so the average office grew from about 14 people to almost 16 (BLS QCEW).
Consolidation hits IT first. Merging firms bring 2 file servers, 2 phone systems, and 2 sets of logins, and all of it has to become one before the next deadline. We did that for 2 merging CPA firms with about 25 people between them, moving both onto one managed environment and one 3CX phone system, and the CPA firm merger case study walks through it.
Seasonal preparers are part of the plan. Accounts, laptops, and MFA get set up before they start in January and shut off the day they leave, so a former temp’s login isn’t still open in June. The IRS side runs on Publication 4557 and a written information security plan, and IRS cybersecurity requirements for Houston CPAs get tested every filing season, not just at PTIN renewal.
Nobody gets a smaller rulebook for running a smaller firm.
For the statewide picture, including the PTIN acknowledgment and the SB 2610 size tiers, see our page on CPA and accounting IT services in Texas.
Restores get tested every quarter on the fully managed plan, so April isn’t the first time anyone finds out whether last year’s returns come back.
By the Numbers
The Numbers
Only healthcare pays more per breach than financial services, according to IBM’s 2026 study. These are the benchmarks, the Houston numbers behind this page, and Uprite’s own.
$6.29M
Average cost of a financial-sector data breach in IBM’s 2026 study, behind only healthcare among 17 industries.
$3M
Median ransom demanded from financial firms in Sophos’s 2025 survey, the highest of any industry.
92.8%
Of Houston-metro finance and insurance locations employ fewer than 20 people, against 84.2% of all local businesses (US Census Bureau, 2023).
Since 1999
Serving Texas businesses. 7 consecutive MSP 501 rankings, #264 in 2026. SOC 2 Type 1 examination, May 2023.
$138
Per user per month starting price for fully managed financial services IT in Houston. Published. Transparent. No custom-quote games.
| Metric | Data Point | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Average financial services breach cost | $6.29 million | IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, 2026 |
| Median ransom demand, financial firms | $3 million | Sophos State of Ransomware in Financial Services, 2025 |
| Mean ransomware recovery cost | $1.74 million | Sophos State of Ransomware in Financial Services, 2025 |
| Houston finance and insurance locations under 20 employees | 92.8% (9,018 of 9,720) | US Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023 |
| FDIC-insured banks headquartered in the Houston metro | 34, none above $10 billion | FDIC BankFind, June 2026 |
| SEC-registered advisers based in the Houston metro | 300, median firm of 8 employees | SEC adviser data, October 2026 |
| Uprite in business since | 1999 | Uprite Services |
| MSP 501 consecutive rankings | 7 years running, #264 | Channel Futures MSP 501, 2026 |
| Satisfaction guarantee | 120 days | Uprite Services |
| Published starting price | $138/user/month | Uprite Services |
Tell us which regulators you answer to.
You’ll have the gap list in hand before your next exam.
Speak to a Financial Services IT ExpertGetting Started
How We Onboard a Financial Services Firm
A 6-person tax office and a 120-person broker-dealer don’t onboard on the same timeline. The order stays fixed, though, because examiners look for it.
Step 1. Compliance Assessment
We audit your environment against the rules your license carries, whether that’s FINRA and the SEC, FFIEC guidance for banks and credit unions, or the FTC Safeguards Rule. It’s a real gap analysis, not a pitch, listing what’s in place, what’s missing, and what’s exposed. The report is yours whether you hire us or not.
Step 2. Risk and Gap Analysis
Every finding gets an owner, a fix, and a date, ranked by what an examiner would flag first rather than what’s quickest to close. Missing MFA goes to the top. So does a backup nobody has restored this year.
Step 3. Security Stack Deployment
Endpoint detection, email security, credential monitoring, backups, and monitoring agents go in next. Each change is logged through our change process, so the compliance file grows as the work happens.
Step 4. Onboarding and Migration
Staff get their help desk accounts and a direct line to the team, and we deal with your outgoing provider so you don’t have to. The 120-day satisfaction guarantee starts here. Not working? You leave.
Step 5. Ongoing Monitoring and Audit Prep
24/7 monitoring. Helpdesk support. Quarterly access reviews. Quarterly restore tests. When the exam letter arrives, the evidence is already filed.
Expect 3-6 weeks end to end. A 15-person RIA running entirely on Microsoft 365 lands near the short end. A firm with an on-premise server in Sugar Land, offices in The Woodlands and downtown, and an aging trading platform lands near the long end.
Honest Fit Check
Who This Is Built For
| Right fit |
|---|
| RIAs and wealth management firms in the Houston metro with 15 to 150 users |
| Broker-dealers regulated by FINRA needing compliance-aligned IT infrastructure |
| Energy-trading firms, commodity desks, and energy-focused private equity managing confidential positions and deal flow |
| CPA, tax, and bookkeeping firms covered by the FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557 |
| Community banks and credit unions answering to the FDIC, OCC, Federal Reserve, or NCUA |
| Insurance agencies and financial planning firms with multi-location teams |
| Any Houston-area financial firm where the person responsible for IT also has 3 other jobs |
We’d rather be honest about fit than spend 3 months trying to make it work for the wrong firm.
Before You Switch
What Keeps Financial Firms From Making a Change
At this stage the managing partner usually asks the same questions.
“We already have IT support.”
Maybe. But has your current provider been through a SOC 2 examination, and will they show you the report? Could they walk an examiner through how their controls support your FINRA Rule 3110 supervision? Do they know the amended Reg S-P expects you to hold them to a 72-hour breach notice? A no, or an “I’m not sure,” on any of those means you’re buying general IT support for a regulated firm.
“Managed IT is expensive.”
Fully managed IT starts at $138 per user per month, about $4,140 a month for a 30-person office. IBM puts the average financial-sector breach at $6.29 million. Run the numbers. At that rate, one average breach costs more than a century of IT support for the same office.
“Switching providers is too disruptive.”
Fair. So the first 120 days carry a satisfaction guarantee, and your rate is locked for year one. Walk away inside that window with no penalty. We wrote it that way because the fear of switching is usually bigger than the switch.
“Our firm is too small to be a target.”
Size isn’t the filter. In Houston, 92.8% of finance and insurance locations have fewer than 20 people, so a small office is the typical target here, and Sophos found the median ransom demand against financial firms reached $3 million in its 2025 survey. A crew working a phishing list doesn’t check your AUM first. It checks who clicked.
Definition
Financial Services IT in Houston, Defined
Three Things That Set Uprite Apart for Financial Firms
SOC 2 Type 1 Examined (May 2023)
An independent accountant examined our security controls in May 2023. When your examiner asks about your IT vendor, you hand over a dated report, not a promise. The controls behind it run through our cybersecurity solutions.
Published Pricing, No Guessing
$138 per user per month for fully managed IT, locked for year one, with no surprise line items in month 6. Many financial IT providers in Houston still make you request a quote. We just tell you.
Houston Office With Real People
16441 Space Center Blvd, Suite B-1, in Clear Lake. When a problem needs hands on hardware, or an examiner wants someone in the room to walk through your network, a local technician shows up. Your ticket isn’t routed to a call center in another state.
What Clients Say
Hector and Kareem are super helpful! They are always willing to take on my computer problems even if its small. I had my mouse disappear off my screen, it was an user issue but Hector didn't make me feel small or "dumb" for this error. We love uprite!
I had been having trouble with an IT matter that I didn't think would be fixed but Arvin Ebueng from Upright took his time with me and worked with me until we were able to resolve the issue. The issue was an internal issue with the way the program was written, but Arvin came up with a great work around so that I am now able to do what I need to do at my job. Long story short, he got me access to both things that I need access to simultaneously and daily. Thanks 😊 Arvin, you are much appreciated 👏 💐 🥳.
I'm am not a "tech" person, however the team at Uprite gets me through the technological side of computers and software so that I can function on a daily basis... but the most enduring quality is that they care. Special shoot out to Mary, Sergio, Eufemio, Hector, and Jeff just to name a few... I appreciate each of you and the help you give me.
Uprite has been one of the best services the company I work with has provided for us they help us with any issues we run into and are always easy to work with, and very patient with us and friendly.
We use this IT Service at Delta Fastener, they are always helpful and prompt with their responses. They solve our computer issues quickly and effectively. A knowledgeable staff is the most important asset to a company - Uprite fills that gap for us by being a partner in business for all of our IT issues. Outsource what you don't know and focus on what is really making you money!
FAQ
What Houston Financial Firms Ask First
FINRA and SEC rules, including the amended Regulation S-P and Reg S-ID, plus SOX Sections 302 and 404, GLBA and the FTC Safeguards Rule, FFIEC guidance for banks and credit unions, and PCI DSS for firms that take card payments. Our SOC 2 Type 1 examination in May 2023 covered our security controls. We map your environment to the rules your firm type actually answers to, not a generic checklist.
Fully managed IT starts at $138 per user per month, with a year-one rate lock. A 25-person RIA would run roughly $3,450 a month, and a 75-person broker-dealer closer to $10,350. Firms that keep their own IT person can go co-managed from $100 per user, and security-only coverage starts at $40. We publish those numbers because financial firms budget carefully and shouldn’t have to sit through a sales call to get one. And with the 120-day satisfaction guarantee, a bad fit doesn’t lock you in.
Yes, including Orion, Black Diamond, Addepar, Tamarac, and Morningstar Direct on the portfolio side, and Schwab, Fidelity, and Pershing on the custodian side. Trading operations get Bloomberg terminals and commodity or energy market-data feeds supported too. Running something more specialized? Ask, and we’ll tell you quickly whether it’s a fit.
Containment comes first, then communication, then documentation. Affected systems get isolated right away, your designated contacts hear from us well inside the 72-hour notice the amended Reg S-P has you require from vendors, and the forensic record your customer notices will rest on starts immediately. Compliance counsel and, if needed, your custodian get pulled in, and every step lands in your regulatory file.
It’s the combination. A SOC 2 Type 1 examination of our security controls in May 2023, and we’ll show you the report. Published pricing from $138 per user per month, while many financial IT providers in Houston still make you request a quote. A 120-day satisfaction guarantee with a year-one rate lock. And 7 consecutive MSP 501 rankings, on top of serving Texas businesses since 1999.
In stages is the usual path, and a typical move takes 3-6 weeks. We coordinate directly with your current provider. The compliance assessment and security stack come first, then the help desk, monitoring, and daily support move over on a schedule your team sets. The 120-day guarantee runs across the whole changeover.
We do, at the same published $138 per user per month, with tax season setting the schedule. We set up seasonal preparers before January and shut their access off the day they leave, keep the written security plan the IRS and FTC expect, and keep big changes out of the weeks before April 15 and October 15.
Uprite supports Houston community banks and credit unions, including branch networks, core platforms from Jack Henry, Fiserv, and FIS, and the incident runbook behind the 36-hour notice banks owe their federal regulator. Credit unions get the NCUA version, which runs 72 hours.
Our average response time is currently 5.06 minutes across every support ticket, with triage inside 10 minutes. Emergency support is always available, including the last trading day of a quarter. When hardware has to be touched, a technician drives out from our Houston office.
It writes your IT provider into your incident plan. Under the 2024 amendments, broker-dealers and SEC-registered advisers need a written incident response program, have to oversee service providers that must report a breach to them within 72 hours, and owe affected customers notice within 30 days. Larger firms had to comply by December 3, 2025, and smaller ones by June 3, 2026.
Start Here
Every Week Without Compliant IT Is Another Week of Exposure
Since June 3, 2026, every broker-dealer and SEC-registered adviser, large or small, has needed a written incident response program under the amended Reg S-P. Banks answer to a 36-hour clock, credit unions to 72 hours. Texas can fine a business up to $100 per affected person for each day it fails to take reasonable steps to send breach notices, up to $250,000 per breach. Plans written afterward don’t count.
If your firm manages money, books, or deals in Houston without an IT provider that’s been examined, publishes its response time, and maps its controls to your regulator, the risk isn’t theoretical.
It’s a calendar problem.
Your next exam already has a date.
Or call our Houston office directly at (281) 956-2280.
