From Noise to Nuance: How Dashboards Can Reshape Third-Party Risk Strategies

Olga Baldwin, Head of Third-Party Risk Management at StoneX, offers a candid, deeply experienced perspective on building dashboards that go beyond regulatory box-ticking and actually support strategic risk decisions. She emphasizes that metrics must serve two functions: guiding internal team performance and providing executives with clarity on risk exposure. This starts with understanding what leadership cares about—whether it's onboarding times, issue resolution trends, or concentration of critical vendors by geography.

She warns against vanity metrics that dilute insights—such as completion percentages of irrelevant fields or treating all risks equally, regardless of business context. Instead, dashboards should be built to tell a story: how risk is distributed, where bottlenecks occur, what issues remain unresolved, and whether internal processes are optimized. Olga explains how interactive visuals like heat maps and filtered reports can surface blind spots, such as disproportionate workloads among assessors or risk-heavy clusters in specific locations.

Importantly, she reframes dashboards not as static reporting tools but as living instruments for decision-making. This includes helping identify opportunities to consolidate vendor relationships, reduce costs, and support operational resilience. Olga underscores the need to align risk ratings and definitions across departments through stakeholder engagement and ongoing education—so that dashboards are not only accurate but trusted. For her, a well-built dashboard is less about compliance, and more about clarity, conversation, and control.