Bank Vendor Management

Ncontracts FI^® is a contract management service of Network Contract Solutions designed exclusively for banks and financial institutions that enables them to manage and monitor vendors for mandated FDIC regulatory compliance.

Is your bank ready to save money?

Preparing for a regulatory compliance audit of your vendor management can be very time consuming and expensive. Network Contract Solutions can help your financial institution address bank vendor management issues and meet FDIC regulatory compliance by:

• Providing web-based vendor and contract management tools designed specifically for banks
  • Our paralegals create summaries of material provisions, that each client selects, for selected vendor agreements 
  • Our paralegals organize your vendor agreements with scanned images and links to easily find key documentation
  • Our paralegals create email reminders to insure that significant milestones are monitored by bank personnel
  • Our paralegals identify missing agreements and reach out to vendors with bank’s permission to obtain those agreements
• Providing continued  paralegal support each month as new agreements, addendums, and schedules are executed
• Providing services to collect compliance documents, which can include:
  • Financial information (P/L & balance sheets)
  • Security Policies
  • Confirmation of background security checks
  • Statement on Auditing Standards (SSAE 16 (f/k/a SAS 70) Audits) for IT processes and disaster recovery
  • and More!

Our experienced team will do the necessary legwork to gather the data needed for vendor contract management, saving you valuable time and resources. This helps your organization meet compliance regulations through the most efficient means available.

Don’t take chances with FFIEC, OCC, and FDIC compliance. Contact Network Contract Solutions to learn more about Ncontracts FI^® and how your organization can use this powerful online tool to manage bank vendors to mitigate risks of non-compliance.

Keys to effective bank vendor management 

Establish a vendor compliance policy.

The first critical step in effectively managing bank vendors is to develop and adopt a formal vendor compliance management policy within your financial institution.  The development and adoption of such a policy will bring the issue to the board’s attention, which is ultimately responsible for the process, and highlights the importance of the program to your entire team.  The policy will also provide a framework around which to build your risk assessment ratings.

Manage and monitor bank vendors using Ncontracts FI^®.

Ncontracts FI^® features a unique tool called Nriskmanagement™ to manage and monitor vendors. It gives your bank the ability to manage vendor risk in a way that is tailored to the complexity of each relationship, as required by the FFIEC regulatory guidelines.  Your bank can add custom questions for each vendor and/or each contract, in addition to the many questions that have been included by our experts.

The questions are broken down into the 7 categories of risk.  Your bank not only has the power to control which questions it includes for a particular vendor or contract, but it also has the power to select the weight, or importance, of each question.  Based upon your bank’s answers to the selected questions, and the weight given to each, Nriskmanagement™ will calculate the risk in each area for each vendor. High level results are displayed graphically on the dashboard for a quick review by the Board or auditors, and examiners can be given read-only access to the entire system when necessary.  Furthermore, required documentation can be attached electronically and email reminders can be set up for required updates. 

FDIC Regulatory Compliance and Bank Vendor Management

Bank vendor management is a hot button issue for banks in the face of regulatory pressure.  Regulations are constantly changing, and regulation enforcement continues to increase in its intensity and frequency.  There are three primary reasons why banks have a heightened interest in bank vendor management:

1. a greater reliance on third parties by banks;
2. regulations regarding data privacy and security; and
3. the increased focus on data safety due to publicized data breaches.

Regulatory compliance raises the importance of bank vendor management from a department-level process to a true enterprise-wide concern since members of the board of directors can be held personally liable for non-compliance situations.

According to the FDIC statement dated June 6, 2008, the board of directors and senior management are ultimately responsible for identifying and controlling the risks associated with vendors:

“An institution’s board of directors and senior management are ultimately responsible for managing activities conducted through third-party relationships, and identifying and controlling the risks arising from such relationships, to the same extent as if the activity were handled within the institution.”   FDIC-FIL-44-2008

Meet bank regulatory compliance with confidence.

Ncontracts FI^® enables your bank to respond quickly and confidently to regulatory inquiries and audit demands of examiners.  By simply allowing read-only access for the examiner, our web-based tools gives you peace of mind knowing that you are inspection ready at a moment’s notice.

Added benefits of effective bank vendor management

Effective bank vendor management can yield additional value far beyond reducing risk and satisfying regulatory requirements.  Vendor portfolio and lifecycle management can increase your net profits, improve contract terms and reduce costs from audits, and encourage better performance from vendors. Bank clients have realized a positive return on their investment within the first twelve months of utilizing Ncontracts FI®. For additional information, contact Network Contract Solutions today at 888-552-5658 or request a personal Ncontracts FI^® demonstration.