Intake Is the New Battleground for Third-Party Risk Success

display-middle-ads-here

As Customer Lead at a third-party risk and procurement‑technology provider, I’ve had the privilege (and only the occasional headache) of watching organisations ranging from cutting‑edge fintechs to traditional financial institutions build their third‑party‑risk management programmes.

What strikes me most is that the toughest obstacles are rarely technical. They materialise long before an implementation kicks off, and critically, before formal risk processes even begin.

When I ask clients which phase of the third‑party lifecycle drags the most, onboarding almost always tops the list. Yet when we discuss where new investment is heading, the spotlight typically falls on due‑diligence tooling and risk assessment. This gap tells us something valuable: to shorten onboarding, reduce uncertainty and stop the endless back‑and‑forth, we must start where requests originate, at intake.

Procurement is usually the first touchpoint. A business stakeholder submits a request and answers twenty questions. Then TPRM steps in and asks another twenty. I hear the same complaint every week: “Sixty percent of this overlaps.” The cost isn’t just duplicated effort; it’s slower cycle times, frustrated colleagues, and incomplete context and data from day one.

One of my co-panellists at CeFPro Vendor Risk Europe captured it perfectly: “Procurement touches every part of the organisation. It should be the connective tissue that brings risk considerations in early.”

Our goal isn’t to turn procurement into governance experts; it’s to let them operationalise the standards and controls owned by TPRM. That begins with a single, well‑designed intake. Capture what legal, finance, and risk all need once, then use technology to route processes and enrich the data. Clean inputs enable confident decisions.