Executive Summary
The Head of Vendor Risk Management for one of the world’s largest financial services firm wanted to deploy a supplier risk management program that could determine inherent risk from the start of any supplier relationship and continuously monitor for changes. To do this, every aspect of risk needed to be assessed for criticality: ethics, business continuity, financial health, IT, engagement, sustainability and negative news. All this had to be accomplished while still maintaining efficient supplier onboarding and management.

Working closely with apexanalytix, the financial services firm deployed a supplier management solution filled with automation and data validation. Every supplier risk and associated score became visible in a single dashboard that also provides composite risk scores and trends. Today, the risk review for all categories of vendors is more complete than ever and onboarding is dramatically faster – going from 45 to 4 days.

“Over the last three years, we have not had a risk issue with a supplier and a lot of it has to do with what apexanalytix has been able to provide.”

Head of Vendor Risk Management
Financial Services Firm

Challenge
This large financial services firm, with hundreds of billions in Assets Under Management, has a reputation that cannot be compromised. It faces risks from suppliers and their suppliers. The senior executive in charge of the company’s risk management program built up a robust program of processes, software, vendor questionnaires and manual review over the years. But risk mitigation was slowing down vendor onboarding, frustrating suppliers and creating more work that wasn’t sustainable over time.

Solution
Dedicated to innovation, the company partnered with apexanalytix to implement a data-driven, highly-automated supplier risk management program to determine criticality from the start of the relationship and throughout the lifecycle. Configured to manage risk by supplier type through a combination of built-in and configurable business rules, the risk management solution provides the visibility to effectively protect the company.

The solution’s key capabilities include:

• Three levels of scores – composite, category and signal-level – to elevate and automate mitigation of critical risks.
• Built-in, configurable best-practice risk scoring models and criticality thresholds that can predict future risk associated with suppliers. The inherent risk assessment scoring methodology considers various factors such as supplier profile, products and services provided to the client and other relevant data points.
• Supplier segmentation allows risk scorecards, scorecard components, scoring, weighting and alert thresholds to vary by supplier segment.
• Automated monitoring to determine inherent risk from a broad range of trusted sources:
  • apexanalytix proprietary golden record database of over 100M suppliers to the Fortune 1000
  • third-party scores and reports
  • media monitoring
  • transactional data
  • multi-enterprise community data (from across the apex network of Fortune 1000 clients)
  • supplier questionnairesBank account type (commercial, individual)

Results

• 45 days to onboard a vendor to 4 days
• 6,000 vendors continuously monitor with more than 1,600 added annually
• From a 600-question risk survey that bogged down the supplier onboarding process to automated data collection, risk checking and scoring that cut onboarding time by at least one-third even for critical vendors – while increasing risk analysis.
• Continuous, automated media monitoring against keywords associated with four levels of risk criticality
• Improved vendor relationships with faster risk assessments at onboarding based on vendor service category
• Business users can build mitigation plans, assign actions and track progress in digital workflows based on risk scores