Minimize your organization’s exposure to risks, manage third party relationships at scale.

Organizations are relying more on third party vendors to ensure faster production outcomes, meet tight delivery timelines, and lower costs. However, while expanding their operational ecosystem through third party suppliers to augment their products and services, they get exposed to unforeseen risks.

Risk and compliance objectives are no longer limited to traditional organizational boundaries, rather organizations now  responsible for the actions of their third-parties. Third party risk management is the process of analysing, controlling, and monitoring the risks presented to an organization by a third party vendor.

Key drivers of third party risk management

Business can expose themselves to increased threats due to lack of dedicated third party risk management initiatives. These risks can be complex since it involves various stakeholders from different business functions accessing multiple systems and processes. Some key drivers of third party risk management include:

  • Extended enterprise: The notion of the extended enterprise is becoming more important as firms have become more specialized and interconnected. This is due to globalized trade, standardized processes, and ubiquitous information. There are more dependencies due to this supply web and organizations can impose different types of risks on each other.
  • Regulatory focus: Developments in regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, ‘Outsourcing Requirements’ from British FCA and ABAC has led to third party risk management compliance standards in non-financial sectors.
  • Organizational risk impact: Involvement of third parties in an organization’s business processes, IT Systems, data sharing (PII) models and inadequacies in third party control environments exposes the organization to data breach risks, IT risks, operations failure, and financial risks.
  • Diversity of third party landscape: Third-party relationships also get expanded to contractors, joint ventures, fourth parties, and distributors. They carry different risk profiles making it difficult to identify, analyze, centralize, and monitor information. 

Manage third party risks

Aujas adopts a lifecycle approach to manage your third party risk management needs which includes planning, assessment, remediation, and periodic monitoring and improvement.

Requirement: Identify the objectives (policies & standards) and compliance needs.

Planning: Align resources and set roles & responsibilities to execute risk assessments. Populate and centralize third party catalogue, MSA’s, and engagement data in the risk management system.

Scoping: Categorize third-party vendors as per the requirements This reduces redundancy in questionnaires improving the timelines for completing assessments.

Execution: Execute risk assessment exercise to identify compliance and risk score. Assign relevant questionnaire to respective vendor SPOC and gather responses and artefacts. Employ risk-based segmentation can to effectively categorize third parties and prioritize monitoring.

Remediation: Analyze identified issues and remediate them with corrective measures. Assessor provides feedback to vendor SPOC after questionnaire response review and provides actionable advices to close critical observations. Issues or observations identified also drives the risk identification and remediation process.

Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of vendor performance by comparing current assessment with previous assessment to minimize risk scores.

Expertise to help you manage third party risks

Aujas has the expertise to design end-to-end third party risk management process with industry based best practices and implement a fully automated third party risk management system through a leading GRC platform - RSA Archer.

Features of RSA Archer:

  • Well-designed applications to maintain third party profiles, contracts, fourth parties, IT assets, business process engagement records and their inter-relationships.
  • Customizable applications and third-party risk assessments capable of adding or removing relevant questions, fields, user permissions on the fly.
  • Automated risk assessment campaigns for recurring and periodic assessments.
  • Automated workflows at assessment or application level for reviews and approvals.
  • Intelligent calculation of risk and compliance scores.
  • Roll-up or drill-down scoring approach.
  • Real time graphical reports and dashboards.
  • Governance and performance monitoring with third party metrics.