Insite opens Greenwich Office

By L SAMUEL PFEIFLE

JUNE 11, 2009

Insite Security, a security and risk-management firm specializing in high-networth clients, has opened a second office here to better serve clients here and in surrounding communities like New Caanan, Cornwall, and Stamford. According to CNNMoney.com, Greenwich has a median income of nearly $150,000 and the average home is worth roughly $1.5 million.

The new office is lead by William Whiteside, a former Secret Service agent and Deputy U.S. Marshal. He reports to Insite owner and president Chris Falkenberg, also a former Secret Service agent.

“It’s certainly true that the types of crimes that the wealthy are victimized by increase in times of economic downturn,”said Falkenberg about the reasons for his company’s growth. But he also credits the “low-voltage revolution,” and the AV integrated systems that are now in every high-end home. “Every job we do comes with an AV consultant now,” he said, “which wasn’t the case five years ago.”

Insite now has seven full-time employees, all of them former high-level police officers or federal security employees, and the company designs risk-mitigation polices along with security systems, which are then contracted out to integrators for installation. Falkenberg feels a customer is “best served by having an independent party draft the specifications and then send that out to market for bid, certify them, make sure they’re competent, and then commission the project.”

Falkenberg said infrared technology has become particularly useful and reasonably priced lately, though the cameras can be difficult to make fit a highend home’s architecture and look. “They putting millions into museum-quality design,” he said, “and so we can’t just run with commercial security equipment, even though we need commercial level performance.”

This is just one of many difficulties unique to high-wealth homes. Considering the size of many of these homes’ staffs, “how do you maintain even basic physical security?” Falkenberg posits. “We have to use selective zoning on different entrances, keeping back or side entrances on a 24-hour zone.” Many times, however, a resident will turn the system off completely when home, but “it’s a 10,000-square-foot home,” Falkenberg said, “there’s no way someone can hear a break in on the other side of the house.”

However, these are problems that need solving more and more often, as “there’s an enhanced feeling of vulnerability” now among high-net-worth families and individuals, especially because of the increased amount of information available about such people on the Internet.

And Falkenberg predicted it would only get worse. “There’s a concern about kidnapping,” he said, something that’s a problem for the wealthy in South and Latin America, but has, as yet, not been a frequent problem in the United States.