Most financial and professional services firms don't lack a third-party risk policy — they lack a working system to enforce it. Spreadsheets and email chains break down the moment a vendor estate grows past a few hundred suppliers, and regulators like the FCA, PRA and the EU's DORA framework now expect continuous oversight, not an annual tick-box exercise.
The first step is building a single, authoritative vendor inventory. On ServiceNow, this means configuring the Vendor Risk Management application to sit on top of your CMDB, so every third party is linked to the services, applications, and business processes it supports. Without this linkage, criticality tiering is guesswork.
Once the inventory is live, tiering vendors by criticality — typically Tier 1 (critical), Tier 2 (important), and Tier 3 (standard) — drives everything downstream: assessment frequency, depth of due diligence, and escalation paths. Tier 1 vendors supporting Important Business Services should be reassessed at least annually, with continuous monitoring in between.
Continuous monitoring is where most manual programmes fail. ServiceNow allows you to configure automated triggers — a vendor's financial health score dropping, a breach disclosure, a missed SLA — that automatically kick off a reassessment workflow rather than waiting for the next annual cycle.
Finally, don't underestimate the exit management piece. DORA in particular requires demonstrable exit strategies for critical ICT third parties. Build this into your ServiceNow workflows from day one — retrofitting exit planning after go-live is significantly harder than designing it in from the start.
Karvin has implemented TPRM programmes on ServiceNow for banks, insurers, and professional services firms across the UK and EU. If you're scoping a TPRM build, our free assessment tool gives you a maturity baseline in under ten minutes.
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