TPRM Trailblazers | Issue 1

Scoping Third-Party Risk Assessments for Maximum Efficiency

Letter from the Editors: Welcome to TPRM Trailblazers!

Welcome to the very first issue of the TPRM Trailblazers Newsletter ! We’re thrilled to have you here, and we’re confident that what follows will help you navigate the fast-changing world of third-party risk with clarity and purpose.

Third-party risk management can feel like a constant balancing act – juggling regulations, vendor performance, and evolving cyber threats. With so much noise out there, our goal is to bring you what truly matters: concise insights, proven practices, and stories from professionals who are setting the bar higher every day.

Each edition will spotlight practical approaches you can apply right away, highlight shifts in standards and expectations, and share perspectives from practitioners who know the realities of managing risk across complex ecosystems. This isn’t just another email, it’s the secret weapon every TPRM leader needs to act with confidence.

At its core, TPRM Trailblazers is about community. The work of protecting organizations doesn’t happen in silos, and by connecting the right ideas with the right people, we believe we can collectively raise the standard of practice.

We’re committed to making this newsletter something you look forward to every time it arrives. Let’s get started.

Most professionals would not envy the life of a Third Party Risk Manager.

You may be proud of the program you run, perhaps you even built it yourself. But your company keeps working with more and more vendors each year. You struggle to keep up with the scale, and you keep adding more rules and more processes, each more fragmented and ad-hoc than the last. Your assessment times are getting longer, you feel like you’ve become the bottleneck in the procurement process, and you’re just one missed high-risk vendor away from taking the blame for a catastrophic incident.

If this is you, you’re far from alone. Most third-party risk programs struggle with at least one aspect of scaling processes to match the needs of the business. Even the largest tech companies describe TPRM as ‘compliance friction,’ rather than a crucial business enablement tool. As Lindsay, the TPRM leader at Instacart, put it:

“Traditional TPRM is a horror program – long questionnaires, manual chases, nothing connected to risk. The right approach flips that on its head. It’s automated. It’s everything together. It’s agentic care.”

So how do we untangle this web? Start with a  simple but profound question: “What problem am I trying to solve?”

Start with the Business Context

At the end of the day, the goal of any risk program is straightforward: prevent bad outcomes – a data breach, lost revenue, a compliance miss, or a critical outage. Third-party risk is no different. The biggest mistake most Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) programs make is starting with checklists instead of context.

Ask first: what does this vendor actually do for us, and what’s the real damage if they fail? That single shift changes how you scope the entire assessment.

Look at Controls That Matter

Once you know the context, the right questions almost write themselves. A vendor handling sensitive data? Focus on how they secure that data. A vendor with little exposure? Don’t drag them through a 200-question survey. Every control you check should tie directly back to the risk you’re trying to reduce – whether through their defenses or through safeguards you already have in place.

And remember: evidence has an expiration date. A SOC 2 or ISO certificate might look impressive, but it doesn’t guarantee today’s reality.

Think about it in everyday terms:

• A plane certified five years ago doesn’t mean it’s safe to fly today.
• A blood test from last year doesn’t prove you’re healthy now.
• A car that passed inspection once doesn’t mean the brakes still work.

In TPRM, the same logic applies. You need to scope your assessments around the risks that exist today, not just the paperwork from yesterday.

Starting with the Right Mindset

When you begin with the right mindset, efficiency follows naturally. In Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM), context scoping and control-based assessments unlock efficiency in two primary ways: tiered assessments and intentional automation.

1. Tiered Assessments

When you consider the business context in TPRM processes, you unlock the ability to tier vendors and apply different levels of control-focused assessments based on the vendor’s inherent risk. For example:

• Tier 3 Vendors: A service provider that doesn’t receive data may only require a light-touch review.
• Tier 2 Vendors: A SaaS provider handling user data may need deeper checks on logical controls (e.g., access management, intrusion detection, secure coding).
• Tier 1 Vendors: A cloud infrastructure provider’s assessment may also consider your own company’s controls, leaving only a few external ones to validate.

This approach avoids a one-size-fits-all model, ensuring the right level of scrutiny for the right type of vendor and preventing overallocation of resources to low-risk situations.

2. Intentional Automation

Once tiering is in place, automation multiplies the efficiency gains. The biggest bottlenecks in most TPRM programs are often vendor information collection and analysis of evidence. With smart logic driving control investigation, much of the information collection process can be automated. For example, Agentic AI can:

• Handle questionnaire requests and follow-ups
• Identify control deficiencies
• Approve submissions
• Even auto-complete questionnaires using public info or attestation documents

When designed well, AI agents work together toward one goal: collecting control evidence from multiple sources seamlessly.

3. Real-World Impact

One tech company applied this approach and achieved a 50% reduction in full assessments, and assessment cycle times dropped from days to hours.

They achieved this by:

• Reducing redundant questionnaires during contractor onboarding and follow-up interactions, because the information is already captured and available.
• Removing the need for long vendor questionnaires when a SOC 2 report already addresses the key questions.
• Keeping a backup NIST-based questionnaire for vendors without SOC 2, focused only on risk-reducing controls.
• Leveraging automation and real-time data to identify issues and remediate them before the vendor contract is signed.

This streamlined approach reduced assessment fatigue while allowing risk teams to focus on what truly matters.

Old Wine in a New Bottle

Here’s how you can get started in your own TPRM program:

1. Ask what you’re trying to prevent. Is it data breaches? Critical service outages? Regulatory violations? Start with the end goal in mind and determine what controls will best prevent these situations.
2. Consider using AI to identify patterns across your vendors. Perhaps most of your cloud vendors receive highly sensitive data. Maybe your marketing vendors seldom have SOC 2 certifications. By identifying patterns like these, you can appropriately scope your assessments to save you time while properly managing risk.
3. Look for controls, not just answers. Rather than sending a lengthy questionnaire, consider leveraging AI agents to collect evidence of key controls that address the scoped risks. Sometimes a single document or certification can get you everything you need.
4. Collaborate with other teams. If you see patterns with a certain type of vendor, maybe you should change contractual terms. If a particular business unit tends to work with risky vendors, work with them to help them navigate your process with ease. Collaboration goes a long way to save you time in the long run. This is also a perfect use case for AI agents to summarize trends and recommend remediation.
5. Automate now to prepare for tomorrow. Repetitive actions like vendor onboarding, questionnaire requests, and document processing can be automated using an AI toolset. This gives you the time to focus entirely on risk management instead of process management.

When you scope assessments around business context and use automation with intent, TPRM stops being a slow-moving horror show and starts becoming a genuine business enabler.

Ready to see what fully autonomous, control-based third-party risk looks like in action? [Request a SAFE demo today.]

Closing Thought: Why This Newsletter Matters

Third-Party Risk Management is standing at a crossroads. For too long, it’s been weighed down by checklists and compliance friction – but we now have the tools, frameworks, and community to change that. By scoping assessments to real business context, decentralizing decisions, and embracing automation, TPRM can shift from a burden to a true enabler of growth.

Why now? Because vendor ecosystems are only getting more complex, and the cost of inertia is rising. The good news is that by sharing ideas, approaches, and proof points in spaces like this newsletter, we can move faster together.

This isn’t about fighting risk in isolation. It’s about building a connected movement of TPRM trailblazers who see risk differently – and act decisively to raise the standard of practice for everyone.

Brought to you by:

• Patrick: Before joining Safe Security, he worked at Deloitte, where he designed and implemented cybersecurity initiatives for large companies, focusing on data privacy and third-party risk management.He has a strong background in helping businesses shift their security programs toward strategies that are based on risk rather than checklists. Patrick also brings experience in quantitative finance, which he uses to support cybersecurity efforts with risk models like FAIR, along with other methods of cyber risk quantification.

• Meghan: Meghan is a visionary leader with nearly 20 years of experience in governance, risk, security, and compliance. As a cybersecurity educator and strategist, she drives risk-centric approaches that keep pace with the evolving threat landscape. Her pioneering work in holistic risk management, third-party risk automation, and AI governance, showcased in her ISACA and LinkedIn Learning courses, has earned her the 2023 SC Media Women in Cybersecurity Award and ISACA’s Innovative Solutions Award in both 2024 and 2025.

• Shreya: Shreya is a social media strategist and data-driven researcher with experience across cybersecurity, consulting, and consumer technology. She has worked in analytics and research roles and was selected for McKinsey & Company’s Next Generation Women Leaders program. An alumna of Miranda House (CS) and IIT Madras (Data Science & Engineering), she’s passionate about using data and storytelling to drive impact at scale.