7 Vendor Risk Attributes to Consider

Podcast Transcript

Welcome to this week’s Third Party Thursday! My name is Branan Cooper and I’m the Chief Risk Officer here at Venminder.

When you outsource a product or service to a vendor, it’s important to clearly understand the risk that decision may represent to you and your customers. Many of these are laid out in the regulatory guidance, but I thought it would be good to briefly laundry list what we see as many of the common ones

The 7 vendor risk attributes are Strategic business, Capital, Liquidity, Compliance/legal, Operational, Cyber and Reputational. We’ll go through each of them now.

1. Strategic business
   This involves adverse business decisions. Some examples of that are:
   
   • Mergers
   • Alliances
   • Major system changes
   • Growth
   • New markets
   • Business process changes
   • New products or services
2. Capital
   This is losses resulting from events at the service provider. A couple of examples of this are:
   
   • Data breaches resulting in fraud
   • Contract performance
3. Liquidity
   This is inadequate funds to settle accounts, such as disruptions to cash letter processing or other settlement systems
4. Compliance/legal
   This would be violations of regulations or laws, or non-compliance with internal policies. It may involve:
   • Data breaches
   • Funds availability
   • Accuracy of account statements
5. Operational
   This is risk of loss from failed or inadequate internal process, people, systems or external events. For example:
   • Employee errors or abuse
   • Business continuity and disaster recovery
6. Cyber
   The potential for a cyber attack. This would involve:
   • Service disruption
   • Data destruction
   • Theft of funds or data
   • Data corruption
7. Reputation
   This involves negative public opinion. Of which could be from:
   • Data breaches
   • Service disruption
   • Poor customer service
   • Poor delivery of products

Now you know the 7 vendor risks to consider: Strategic business, Capital, Liquidity, Compliance/legal, Operational, Cyber and Reputational.

Again, my name is Branan Cooper and thank you for watching! If you haven’t already, subscribe to the Third Party Thursday series.