Quickly build and iterate on a bespoke platform for your entire vendor management lifecycle
For financial institutions, CX, security, and business performance are increasingly dependent on third-party vendors. This approach allows firms to tap into specialized skill sets, but also comes with challenges. Like it or not, your vendors’ problems can become your problem. In addition to damaging your brand if vendors fail to deliver on key customer KPIs, companies can be fined by regulators if a vendor doesn’t meet expectations.
Today, most firms use outdated, inflexible systems to manage vendors. Such solutions can’t keep pace with today’s constant regulatory changes, nor can they support robust internal review workflows to determine compliance, legal, and tech risk.
Often, managers end up resorting to spreadsheets and emails, with all the risks and frustrations that manual, stop-gap measures entail. On top of that, it’s difficult to surface insights on vendor performance and ROI.
“I see a lot of banks managing third-party relationships in Excel spreadsheets and emails, and it’s painful for everybody involved,” says Christian Lewis, Client Director for financial services at Unqork.
Instead, financial firms need a centralized system to manage their third-party providers. The solution has to meet the unique business, organizational, and regulatory requirements of their industry and their business. And they have to be able to evolve the system quickly and efficiently to support new reviews and generate dynamic insights.
Fortunately, no-code application platforms have a wide set of features that solve exactly this kind of challenge.
Custom solutions quickly grow stale
Often, custom vendor management solutions worked well when they first came online, but their rigid structure makes it hard to adapt to regulatory changes and technological advances.
“They tend to be very customized and tailored, but they’re also under-resourced and difficult to manage,” says Lewis. “It’s hard just to get a button changed or a new field added.”
“KYC and ESG are critical when making due diligence decisions, but home-grown tools were just not built to handle the data structures of these new requirements—and they for sure aren’t tapping into some of the latest technology partners to help further automate the data”
The advent of new technologies have pushed these solutions beyond their limits, according to Lewis. “KYC and ESG are critical when making due diligence decisions, but home-grown tools were just not built to handle the data structures of these new requirements—and they for sure aren’t tapping into some of the latest technology partners to help further automate the data,” he says.
Point solutions for vendor management tools are too generic
While they are faster and easier to implement, pre-built point solutions for managing third-party vendors come with their own built-in limitations. They are not designed for the unique organization of individual financial institutions—for example, the critical function of routing tech security reviews. And the pre-built KPIs often don’t actually meet the needs of individual institutions.
“They’re not really going to give you the type of reporting that actually delivers value-add,” says Lewis. “Imagine a world where you can predict risk across your critical vendors and make smarter decisions about where your spend is allocated by consolidating partners that are unused.”
And UIs tend to be particularly challenging to use for the people who manage vendor relationships, adds Lewis. “Having an intuitive UI for your vendor relationship owners is so critical when it comes to getting timely feedback on performance,” says Lewis. “You also should not need to make your vendor relationship owner do all the heavy lifting. The vendor should have their own portal and notification hub which automatically prompts them to upload data, assessments, and refreshes of documentation.”
The no-code sweet spot
An enterprise-grade no-code platform like Unqork avoids the perennial problems of traditional custom code-based and point solutions. With an all-visual development environment like Unqork’s, even less experienced developers (Unqork calls them Creators) can quickly design and build a centralized solution for managing the entire lifecycle of third-party vendors.
The plug-and-play approach to integration enables you to even create and manage transactions involving all kinds of disparate systems.
Finally a no-code platform brings all of the tools necessary to build applications into one ecosystem, dramatically reducing the time it takes to build, manage, and maintain the environment itself.
A centralized solution for the entire third-party vendor lifecycle
With no-code, you can quickly build a third-party vendor management solution. You can tailor it to meet the unique business, organizational, security, and compliance needs of your organization, from onboarding through termination. And you can iterate quickly.
Without writing a single line of code, you can build a flexible solution for the entire third-party vendor lifecycle, including:
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Onboarding: Automate conflict checks and NDA issuance. Enable vendors to complete comprehensive RFPs and highly customized tech risk reviews. Automate management of reviews, approvals and risk reviews. Centralize and automate contract creation.
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Management: Create effective KPIs to track vendor performance. Centralize and simplify payments, and avoid loss of critical services due to non-payment. Gain global oversight of all vendor relationships to better manage costs and eliminate duplicate services.
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Offboarding: Centrally manage the termination of contracts. Ensure completion of associated tasks.
“Third-party vendor management has been a particularly underserved area when it comes to software, and yet you’re probably leaving millions of dollars on the table each year,” says Lewis. “But no-code is about to change that, and a platform like this can pay for itself in less than a year of being stood up.”
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo with one of our no-code experts.
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