Stay Informed: An Important Vendor Risk Best Practice

Whether you know it or not, you need to be a news-hound in third party risk management. This helps you stay informed and educated. 

Stay Informed In Third Party Risk Management!

There are plenty of ways to do it, but here are seven ways to stay informed that I highly recommend:

1. Read the daily news - American Banker, The Wall Street Journal, BankersOnline and various industry publications are all an excellent source of information. They are the industry experts and combine the best reporting into easy to read analysis. Here at Venminder, we publish content which include industry best practices, new regulations and guidance and lists of articles we deem important.
2. Be on the lookout for industry information - Whether you set up Google news alerts or have a sophisticated webcrawler looking for any news (good or bad) about your third parties, you need to stay informed on what’s going on. These are just a couple of ways to set up alerts and stay ahead of the game.
3. Watch the competition - What are their best practices or shortfalls? While watching the competition you can learn from their mistakes. Similarly, enforcement actions are a great lens through which to look at your own practices.
4. Learn from other triumphs or problems - Read relevant enforcement actions and articles. The FDIC and OCC make them public on their websites each month. Learn from others mistakes and review your practices to ensure they are sound.
5. Discuss with industry experts - Whether it’s an industry conference or a cup of coffee with your Information Security team, you’re surrounded by a wealth of information. It’s important to utilize your resources to stay educated and aware of best practices and changes.
6. Listen to the tweets - Who would have thought social media could have such an impact? Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook can tip you off to emerging trends, interesting issues and even customer complaints. Remember, it’s important to stay informed of complaints in order to protect your reputation risk. 
7. Read white papers and find other interesting content - Looking at various law firms can also help. The fine folks at Ballard Spahr and JD Supra, for example, can help make sense of the most complex regulations.

And that’s it – implement these seven best practices to build and maintain a strong third party risk management foundation. 

To learn how your peers are keeping up with third party risk, download our whitepaper.