How Atom Bank Rebuilt TPRM from the Ground Up

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In third-party risk management, everyone wants to know which shiny solution you’ve bought. But the real question isn’t which vendor you picked – it’s whether your organisation knew what it was solving for in the first place. 

Without a clear strategy, even the best tech becomes a distraction. That’s why the focus shouldn’t be on tools. It should be on building the right foundation before you start to think about automation.

I’m often asked which vendor solution we use to manage third-party risk.

My answer usually surprises people – we haven’t fully committed to one yet. Not because we’re slow adopters, but because we’ve been deliberate. Technology isn’t where you start. Process and Strategy is.

In our space, it’s tempting to chase tools – flashy dashboards, automation, AI promises. But what I’ve seen, time and again, is that organizations dive into tooling without truly understanding what they’re optimizing for. 

We didn’t want to make that mistake. So, for 12 to 18 months, my team focused on frameworks, process design, and stakeholder alignment. Only now are we thinking seriously about automation.

We’ve taken a different path from the outset by combining procurement, third-party risk, and resilience into one function. 

That decision broke down internal silos and allowed us think about value and risk as a single conversation. 

When you do that, you stop thinking in terms of a handoff between departments and start thinking in terms of holistic lifecycle ownership. You get the data cleaner, faster, and more consistently.

And with that, AI becomes not just possible – it becomes powerful.

For example, I once spent months mapping a service taxonomy manually at a large investment bank. At Atom, we ran the same exercise through a generative AI model in a matter of hours.

It grouped services, matched them to our third-party register, and flagged overlaps. The result? An intelligent, rationalized vendor list. That’s not innovation for innovation’s sake. That’s practical, usable tech in action.