High State of Vendor Risk

Financial organizations have used outsourcing entities to bring down costs and offer efficient customer service in a lot of key processes. As a result key processes in organizations are being run by vendors.

The biggest vendor risks are privacy of client information, security management, business continuity and process adherence to compliance requirements. Though the outsourced service provider is responsible for providing the service, the ultimate responsibility for managing risk resides with the organization.

Regulations on Client Data Privacy

Outsourced vendors now manage key systems and client data. This has resulted in a lot of client information being with vendors and open to compromise in case the vendors do not have good security management practices. Vendor Risk Management being one of the big risks that organizations face.

A good oversight and continuous process for monitoring all your vendors to identify risks in their process and prevent non-compliance to regulations like GDPR, California Privacy Act is necessary for all organizations.

GRACE Can Help You Monitor Vendor Risks

GRACE Vendor Risk Management helps you manage your vendor relationship in an organized way and track risks as they happen to keep an eye on your high risk vendors. It helps you build your vendor database updated with the latest information on Contracts and SLAs, Business Continuity and Security Management practices. It helps you conduct comprehensive vendor risk assessments and monitor them on a periodic basis and identify risks early to manage.

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05May 20

Frequently Asked Questions on Regulation Best Interest

The staff of the Division…

GRACE allows you to build a good oversight and continuous process for monitoring all your vendors by building your vendor database
It helps you keep and manage information on each of your vendors, their status, locations, contacts, services,Contract documents, Service Level Agreements, Reputation in the market and create a risk score for them
It helps you identify risks in their process and prevent non-compliance to regulations like GDPR, California Privacy Act is necessary for all organizations.
Keep this information updated for easy access

Establish Vendor Management Policies and Procedures

The Organization’s Compliance team can establish and manage vendor Management policies and procedures including review, release and versioning
Through online attestation, the policies and procedures group can ensure all vendor management staff are aware of the required expectations of the organization from its vendors.

Track Incidents

GRACE provides online forms for Incident reporting for Vendors
When Incident information is received through the alert, mitigation tasks have to be set up and managed to closure. GRACE enables these functions and helps monitor vendor incidents through the Incident Dashboard

Use Vendor Dashboard to Monitor High Risk Vendors

The GRACE Vendor Dashboard enables the organization to quickly identify vendors by their level of risks and incidents and build strategies to ensure vendors risks are mitigated or alternate vendors looked at.
The Incident dashboard allows monitoring of incidents, their severity and the status of tasks for incident closure.

Conduct Vendor Risk Assessments

GRACE can help you set up various standardized questionnaires that can be sent to various types of vendors for a comprehensive due diligence on the vendor that can help you identify the maturity status of their security management process, client data management, business continuity and disaster recovery process as well as their adherence to the compliance requirements of the organization.
Calendars for assessments can be set up and alerts for follow up can be received.
Risk Assessment Questionnaires can be sent Online to collect information
Findings can be analysed and risks recorded based on risk level to the organization

Conduct Ongoing Vendor Monitoring

GRACE can help you set up periodic monitoring calendars where risk questionnaires can gather information on their business continuity, security practices, incidents and others to identify early warnings of compliance violations

Vendor Risk Management

Identify high risk areas in Vendor processes from the risk assessments and periodic monitoring
Create and assign risks and issues to staff to define mitigation, and create tasks for follow up with the vendor to ensure the risk is mitigated
Enable risk and task status reporting by responsible person into the GRACE repository to keep track of mitigation status Use the Vendor Risk Dashboard to effectively manage across vendors.

Online Portal for Vendors

GRACE can provide secure access to vendors to report their incidents, answer risk assessment questionnaires to help close monitoring.

Comprehensive monitoring of Vendors

Ensuring an organized, ongoing and comprehensive review of vendors can help identify risks and manage corrective action early

Keeps Vendors on Track

Diligent followup and identification of risk forces the vendors to deliver safety and security of information they manage and improve their processes

Clear Accountability

By making risks visible and with the ability to drill down to the status of mitigation, accountability for vendor risk management can be established and monitored

Early awareness of Risk Trends

Trends of risk in vendors can be very quickly identified with visual analytics , dashboards and drill downs to prevent it from becoming a high risk to the organization

Single Source of Truth for the Organization

Will all documents, data, reviews, audit trails, analytics and easy to use queries and reports, GRACE becomes the central repository of the Single Source of Truth on vendors for the organization.

Risk reporting becomes Online and Real time

With an integrated web based access anytime anywhere, there is no need for risk reports to be generated on vendors to present to senior management.

Regulatory examinations can be handled with confidence

The GRACE system becomes the proof of vendor risk management practice in the organization to face regulatory examinations

Organization Ownership of Data

Organizations suffer when key risk and compliance staff leaves. The information is scattered if maintained solely by individuals and are lying on disks in various forms. GRACE becomes the single central repository of documents, data and processes enabling continuity even when key people leave the organization

Enormous Cost Savings

Enormous costs savings in unwanted labor for audits and examinations, avoid regulatory fines, legal costs, reputation risks and empowers the organization in managing risks.