We’re Listening! MetricStream hosts the First Third-Party Management Customer Product Council

Introduction

The growing dependency of organizations on multiple third parties for critical business operations and services has made their extended ecosystem highly convoluted. The complexities are turned up a notch with fourth and subsequent parties and the amplified digital interconnectedness of organizations in the current digital-first operational environment.

Outsourcing to third and subsequent parties is critical to doing business. However, it also exposes your organization to governance and risk management challenges. A robust third-party management (TPM) program for effectively monitoring the extended enterprise and staying ahead of the associated risks has become indispensable for continued business operations.

The First Third-Party Management Customer Product Council

With three feature releases a year, we constantly innovate and enhance our products and platform. We have now undertaken the initiative to host Customer Product Council sessions to have interactive and engaging conversations with our customers to validate new industry trends and understand their requirements and expectations. The objective is to incorporate the feedback in our forthcoming platform and product releases and empower our customers to strengthen resilience and thrive on risk.

To better understand the evolving business requirements from the TPM perspective, we recently hosted our first Third-Party Management Customer Product Council. The session was insightful and provided us with a deeper insight into the latest trends and themes. In particular, three key themes emerged:

• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)

Unsurprisingly, ESG is a key theme across the board. With the growing global awareness of climate risks, diversity, inclusion, ethical practices, and sustainability along with heightened regulatory focus, organizations today want to be cognizant of not only their own ESG posture but also that of their extended enterprise. We are already making strides in this area with our recently-launched ESGRC product, which, among other things, integrates with third-party risk product and enables organizations to assess and evaluate the ESG posture of their suppliers based on multiple parameters. To request a personalized demo, click here.

• Reducing Third Party Assessment Fatigue

As the number of third parties that an organization deals with continues to proliferate, documenting and managing the relevant information of every individual entity can be extremely cumbersome. This creates several other challenges such as poor visibility into third-party risks, slower onboarding process, duplication of efforts, and other redundancies. Customers are looking for easy ways to simplify monitoring of third-party risks, accelerate onboarding and due-diligence processes, and enhance overall efficiency.

• Fourth-Party Risk Visibility and Monitoring

The extended ecosystem of organizations today goes beyond third parties to fourth, fifth, and subsequent parties. Having an effective oversight of the entire network of suppliers then becomes extremely difficult, often leaving blind spots and making organizations vulnerable to associated risks. Based on our customer engagement, organizations today are concerned about three key questions:

• How do we get fourth-party information from third parties?
• There could be a critical fourth party with which many of our third parties have relationships. How do we identify such critical/riskiest fourth parties?
• What level of monitoring should we do on such fourth parties?

We are appreciative of our customers for sharing their honest opinions, expectations, and pain points with us. The feedback will help us drive future innovations in a way that is more meaningful, relevant, and mutually beneficial.

We are currently adding to the council and plan to meet on a quarterly basis. If you’re a TPM customer and want to power what’s next, join the TPM Customer Product Council today! You can reach out to me directly at ahanchinamani@metricstream.com.