For CISOs, Heads of Risk, and Vendor Risk Leaders
Financial institutions sit under converging expectations from OCC, FDIC, the Interagency TPRM Guidance, FINRA's third-party updates, and emerging EU regimes like DORA, all of which now treat third-party risk as a core element of safety and soundness. The mandate is explicit: maintain a complete vendor inventory, risk-tier third parties, perform proportionate due diligence, and evidence ongoing oversight across the lifecycle.
In practice, vendor sprawl has outpaced program capacity. Business units procure SaaS, data, cloud, and niche fintech services independently, creating portfolios ranging from hundreds to thousands of vendors with inconsistent onboarding rigor and historical gaps in tiering.
"Audit and examination findings repeat the same themes: incomplete inventories, risk assessments that are outdated or missing, weak or undocumented ongoing monitoring, and remediation actions that carry over exam to exam without closure."
These are not design failures of policy; they are execution failures driven by limited headcount, fragmented workflows, and reliance on email and spreadsheets to manage inherently continuous obligations.
GRC platforms give organizations a central system of record: they store vendor profiles, capture assessments, and support policy mapping and reporting. They are strong at documentation and governance scaffolding, and regulators increasingly expect that level of structure for complex institutions.
What they do not do is run the program. Day-to-day execution still depends on internal teams to issue questionnaires, chase responses, interpret control narratives, validate evidence, create findings, and push remediation through to closure.
"The result is a well-populated GRC instance that reflects work partially done, not work completed."
Annual or biannual cycles quickly fall behind as vendor counts grow, leading to a pattern where only a subset of critical vendors receives timely attention while medium and low tiers are deferred. Remediation gets logged but stalls because no one owns the follow-through across dozens of vendors and hundreds of issues. Attempts to plug the gap with consultants create a temporary surge in activity but also long-term dependency and knowledge drain once engagements end.
A TPRM execution engine such as Thirdsentry is built to handle the work your GRC tool assumes is already happening: assessments, evidence validation, monitoring, and remediation, at scale. Thirdsentry automates vendor assessments, validates responses with AI-first analysis, and centralizes vendor risk data so that your team reviews outcomes instead of orchestrating every step.
For financial services, the practical change is in outcomes, not interfaces. Assessment cycles compress from weeks to hours for many vendors through AI-driven scoring and analysis, while analyst oversight ensures that high‑risk findings are correctly interpreted and prioritized. Evidence is checked rather than assumed; weak or missing controls become concrete remediation tasks with owners, due dates, and escalation paths, and Thirdsentry tracks them to closure rather than leaving them as open findings.
"Continuous monitoring and live risk signals provide visibility between formal review cycles, reducing the likelihood that a material vendor issue surfaces first in an exam or incident review."
Thirdsentry explicitly separates platform and managed execution: organizations can run assessments and workflows themselves on the AI-powered platform, or offload outreach, validation, and remediation end-to-end to Thirdsentry analysts via Managed, or blend both as their maturity and bandwidth evolve. This distinction lets you retain governance and decision ownership while shifting as much operational weight as you need off your internal team.
Institutions adopting an execution-focused model should expect meaningful but realistic gains. Thirdsentry's AI-first automation reduces manual assessment effort and review time, often cutting the time spent per vendor by roughly half while maintaining or improving rigor. Analyst workload on coordination tasks (questionnaire administration, evidence chasing, status tracking) drops substantially because those activities are handled by the platform and, where used, Thirdsentry's managed team.
Coverage expands as backlogs are cleared: organizations that previously limited detailed assessments to a narrow set of critical vendors can extend structured reviews and monitoring to a broader portion of their portfolio without a one‑for‑one increase in headcount.
"The net effect is not that 'TPRM becomes effortless,' but that scarce internal capacity is reallocated toward risk decisions, regulatory engagement, and complex exception handling instead of repetitive coordination work."
Remediation discipline improves when findings are systematically converted into tasks, with timelines and escalation built into the operating model rather than left to ad hoc follow-up.
Thirdsentry is designed for financial institutions that:
Already have, or are implementing, a GRC platform but recognize that the GRC tool will not run vendor risk day to day.
Manage at least a few hundred third parties and feel the gap between policy, stated risk appetite, and what can realistically be executed with the current team.
Want to retain ownership of risk decisions and governance while shifting execution burden to a specialized platform and, where appropriate, a managed team.
It is not a fit for organizations looking to replace their GRC system of record, those still defining basic vendor risk policies from scratch, or teams that only want a static questionnaire tool without evidence validation, continuous monitoring, or structured remediation follow-through. It is also not intended for firms that insist all execution remain strictly internal without external operational support, since the core value is reducing that internal workload rather than adding another system for the same team to feed.
"Financial services TPRM programs rarely fail for lack of frameworks or systems; they fail when execution work exceeds available capacity."
Thirdsentry sits alongside your existing GRC tools as the execution layer — combining an AI-powered platform with optional managed operations — so your organization can demonstrate that vendor risks are not only identified, but validated, monitored, and driven to closure.