Vendor Management

Referrals and Breach Notification Requirements

I've recently been asked whether a financial institution has Breach Notification responsibility in the case where the institution refers customers to vendors such as financial service providers where the institution merely vetted several vendors as a convenience for its customers, has no contract with the vendors, passes no PII/NPPI to the vendor, receives no referral fees [...]

How Do Your Vendors Stack Up Against Each Other? – VM Thought for 2017

As many of you begin to expand your vendor management programs and elevate their maturity levels, tracking KPI's and KRI's becomes an area of focus. Some of you might even go so far as to track KCI's (Key Controls Indicators). However, in looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) and whether your vendors are meeting their SLA's, [...]

2017-03-16T12:44:57-04:00December 16th, 2016|3rd Party Risk, Risk, Vendor Management|0 Comments

You’re Not Too Small for Multiple Lines of Defense

Classic risk management employs 3 lines of defense. But there's also a possible 4th line when it comes to regulatory issues, specifically vendor management. Please note that I have seen multiple titles that fit the roles below so don't get hung up on the titles. If you're a smaller institution and you wear multiple hats, you [...]

Are your vendors delivering value beyond just meeting SLA’s? How are you measuring their value?

How do you measure your vendor's value?  s vendor management programs mature, we need to understand the value a vendor delivers beyond meeting its Service Level Agreements. While we frequently outsource significant functions (critical and high risk) because a vendor can help us meet our strategic goals, including doing something better/faster/cheaper, what else are we obtaining [...]

A Vendor’s Incident Response Plan is Only Half the Story!

When outsourcing services to vendors where sensitive/confidential data or critical services are involved, most of us request some combination of Business Continuity Plan, DR Plan, DR test results and Incident Response Plan. That's only half the battle. Of particular interest is the Incident Response Plan. The IRP is certainly something you'd want to review but all [...]

Critical Vendor or Critical FUNCTION?

You have HOW MANY critical vendors?!?!?!?!? I always find the perception of CRITICAL VENDOR to be very interesting. As Certified Regulatory Vendor Program Managers (CRVPM) know, when reviewing vendor management programs we typically see way too many vendors listed as critical, usually for a couple of reasons; 1) either the business unit thinks that their vendors [...]

2017-03-16T12:55:25-04:00March 24th, 2016|3rd Party Risk, Audit, ERM, GRC, Risk, Vendor Management|0 Comments

So many SOC’s to review, so little time and staff to go around. Here’s a crash course:

Crash course here: http://bit.ly/1Oobnan Everyone is heavily overburdened with the demands of trying to comply with regulations. So if your IT or Info Security team doesn't have enough staff to review all SOC reports (or possibly just reviews those with exceptions) yet your internal audit dept wants proof that reviews of all SOC reports are conducted, [...]

Reassessing Vendor Risk – An Ongoing Necessity

So you've done your initial INHERENT risk rating of your vendor and then conducted your due diligence to determine the RESIDUAL risk and you're comfortable doing business with the vendor so you sign a contract. A year from now you plan to conduct the periodic review. But a number of things might have occurred from the [...]

2017-03-16T12:58:50-04:00February 9th, 2016|3rd Party Risk, Audit, ERM, GRC, Risk, Vendor Management|0 Comments

Plan Your Exit Before You Outsource!

When considering outsourcing a service, it's essential to have an Exit Strategy in place so that you can transition the service to another vendor or bring it back in house prior to or at the end of the contract term. This should be done before you even consider searching for a vendor. A well thought out [...]