Third-party and supplier risk reviews that keep up with the supplier base
Third-party risk applications that tier suppliers, run due diligence, extract evidence from documents and track issues, with reviewers deciding.
Most organizations depend on hundreds or thousands of third parties: cloud providers, outsourcers, suppliers, data processors, agents, fintech partners. Regulators increasingly hold the organization accountable for those dependencies. Yet third-party risk management often runs on questionnaires sent by email, answers pasted into spreadsheets, and reviews that happen at onboarding and then never again.
What the application does
The third-party risk family in the Atlas manages the full supplier risk lifecycle:
- Intake: a business owner requests a new third party, with the service description, data access and criticality.
- Tiering: inherent risk is scored from the service, data, criticality and jurisdiction, which determines the depth of due diligence.
- Due diligence: questionnaires, document requests (certifications, audit reports, policies) and specialist reviews such as security, privacy, financial and legal.
- Assessment: reviewers record findings, and issues get remediation actions.
- Approval: a risk-based approval with conditions.
- Contracting: required clauses confirmed, then onboarding.
- Ongoing monitoring: periodic re-reviews, certificate expiry, incidents, performance and external signals.
- Exit planning: for critical services, as regulators now expect.
Where AI helps
- Document intelligence: extract scope, dates, exceptions and qualified opinions from SOC reports, ISO certificates and policies. This is where reviewers spend most of their time.
- Questionnaire analysis: flag answers that contradict the evidence or are incomplete.
- Tiering suggestions: propose a tier from the intake description, for the risk owner to confirm.
- Monitoring summaries: condense external news and incident signals about a supplier into a short brief, with sources.
- Report drafting: assessment summaries and committee papers.
Risk acceptance, approval and exit decisions stay with accountable owners.
Controls designed in
- Mandatory due-diligence steps by tier
- Segregation between the requesting business owner and the approving risk function
- Evidence retained against each finding
- Re-review triggers on expiry, incidents or changes in service scope
Integrations
Procurement and contract management systems, ERP vendor master data, GRC tools, security rating or intelligence feeds where used, the identity provider, and email for supplier correspondence.
Who uses it
Procurement managers, third-party risk teams, security and privacy reviewers, compliance officers, business owners of each relationship, and internal audit.
Where it applies
Financial services, where outsourcing and operational-resilience rules apply. Government entities managing contractors. Any enterprise with significant data processors or critical suppliers.
First scope
Critical and high-tier suppliers first: move them into the application with evidence extracted from their latest reports, and switch on monitoring. Scope it in a Solution Definition Sprint.
Explore the Atlas, or bring us your supplier inventory.