Reading the News Is Good for Business and Third Party Risk Management

I confess that I love to read the news. It’s a practice I learned early on at MBNA America. One of our executives, long before the days of internet news feeds and automated alerts, made a practice of circling key stories in The Wall Street Journal, American Banker, The New York Times, and any other relevant financial services news outlets and circulating them for us to read each day.

Nowadays, the access to news is much easier thanks to Google News alerts, subscriptions to all sorts of online publications and various automated newsletters. I still start my day by looking at the news that’s come in overnight and typically check back a couple of times a day to see what’s cropped up during the business day.

3 Benefits of Reading the Daily News

1. You’re able to alert people on new enforcement actions and breaches quickly.
2. Gives you the opportunity find items that may cause reconsideration or a new perspective on a particular vendor. Personally, I still remember when the memo outlining FIS’s lapses came out and scrambling to get that news to our CISO before a risk committee meeting.
3. You can monitor your organization’s own public reputation by finding both positive and negative news about your own organization as it arises. There have even been times when I found our company in the news, hopefully always in a good way.

Fortunately, accompanying many articles or releases of new regulatory guidance, there’s often outstanding legal analysis that summarizes what I really need to know or allows me to dig deeper into particular areas that may directly impact our business.

Besides the major publications, a few helpful legal eagle places to look at are Ballard Spahr’s blogs, LinkedIn news - yes, they really do have relevant industry news - and JD Supra’s daily digest of all things newsworthy. Additionally it’s good to subscribe to subscriptions to each of the major regulators’ press releases and enforcement actions.

Let’s not make this all about work. I often finish it off with a quick review of the comic strip, Dilbert, just to keep it all in healthy perspective. That’s all the news that’s fit to print today. 

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