How a U.S. Community Bank Leveraged Third-Party Risk Intelligence

The client

A privately held community bank serving both retail and commercial clients with a full suite of banking, mortgage, insurance, and wealth services sought a smarter way to gain visibility into its growing third-party network. As operations scaled, monitoring vendors, assessing risk, and staying compliant became increasingly complex, prompting the bank to adopt a solution for actionable, real-time intelligence.

The challenge

The bank faced several challenges in its third-party oversight:

• Managing a large portfolio of vendors across multiple risk tiers, including Critical, High, and Significant risk classifications.
• Fragmented data and limited visibility into vendor activities.
• Time-intensive processes for monitoring, reporting, and alerting stakeholders.
• Ensuring relevant intelligence was accessible to the right team members across risk, compliance, and cybersecurity functions.
• Resolving internal audit observations with regard to gaps with regulations like the SEC and Interagency Guidance on Third-Party Risk Relationships. 

The institution needed timely, actionable insights to help teams detect emerging risks, prioritize responses, and align on vendor oversight activities.

The solution

By implementing Owlin, the bank now:

• Monitors a portfolio of vendors organized into risk-based portfolios, with ongoing updates and alerts for new adverse media.
• Configures alerts per user, enabling tailored monitoring for different roles within Third-Party Risk, Cybersecurity, and Compliance teams.
• Maintains an evolving dashboard of entities, ensuring stakeholders have a clear, up-to-date view of vendor risk activity.
• Addressed all internal audit observations with regard to third-party monitoring. 

Owlin provides the bank with real-time third-party risk intelligence, helping teams identify emerging risks early, make informed decisions, and align internal stakeholders around actionable insights.