Innovation in Compliance with Tom Fox Contracts as a Third-Party Risk Management Tool with Brad Hibbert
Tom Fox welcomes Brad Hibbert on this episode of the Innovation in Compliance Podcast. Brad is the Chief Strategy Officer of Prevalent, Inc. He joins Tom to talk about how Prevalent helps companies manage third-party risk, the importance of risk management, and what the future for risk management in the compliance world may look like.
Managing Third-Party Risk
Tom asks Brad to explain how Prevalent helps companies manage third-party risks. "We have a SaaS platform that helps organizations identify those risks, report against those risks, and then provide remediation capabilities to reduce those risks at every stage of the vendor lifecycle," Brad tells Tom. Risk management is no longer about just doing reactive reporting on an annual basis. Risk has to be proactively monitored, identified, and reduced on a day-to-day basis, and especially when companies are having day-to-day conversations with their third parties during contract execution. Prevalent enables its risk management platform by having different team members interact with the third parties to collaborate and reduce the risks at every stage of the vendor life cycle.
A Must Have
Third-party risk management is a must-have right now, and will continue to be in the future. "What organizations are realizing is they have to move beyond the compliance check box and actually reduce the risk associated with these third parties," Brad remarks. Compliance is one of the drivers of this, but another main factor is the pandemic. COVID has changed the way companies and businesses operate, and has also exposed their weaknesses. With the shift to the hybrid work environment, and the increase of work from home, companies have had rapidly onboard third-party risks due to the use of online platforms. The risk of cyber-attacks and information being leaked is high, so being able to manage and protect companies from that is paramount.
The Contract Essentials SaaS Solution
Tom asks Brad to explain the contract essentials SaaS solution. The SaaS solution allows the company to onboard or add existing contracts. Prevalent's platform has very strong workflow and collaboration capabilities that focus on vendor risk, which is also good for profiling current contracts to see where the risk lies. Companies can use the SaaS solution to upload their contracts, or any related documentation surrounding it to a secured file, and it allows them to collaborate with third parties outside of the corporate network.
The Future of Third-Party Risk Management
Brad predicts a convergence of third-party risk management and the broader third party. "We're going to continue to focus on building solutions that are easy to use that enable data sharing between the different groups that promote efficiency, collaboration, and then risk reduction," he says. Organizations can no longer simply rely on assessments, instead must have continuous insights play major roles at all levels of the vendor life cycle. Monitoring the financial risk, the business risk, and the cyber risk proactively to create appropriate measures is something that will continue as well.
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