Topic starter
11/11/2026 5:57 pm
TL;DR: Third-party risk teams still spend most of their time on questionnaires, SOC 2 reviews and policy checks, according to Vendict. The operating model only improves when evidence is structured, traceable and reviewable instead of buried in documents.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Vendict: “The AI-Native Future of Third-Party Risk Management: Inside Info-Tech Research Group’s Analyst Report on Vendict”.
Key questions
Q: Why does manual TPRM slow vendor approval so much?
A: Manual TPRM slows vendor approval because every questionnaire item has to be chased, interpreted, validated, and rekeyed across email, spreadsheets, and approvals.
Q: How should security teams govern third-party access in identity programs?
A: Treat third-party access as a managed identity relationship with an owner, scope, expiry, and revocation process.
Q: How should teams keep third-party questionnaire answers evidence-backed?
A: Keep third-party questionnaire answers evidence-backed by linking each response to a current source document, such as a policy, control record, audit report, or contract clause, and by recording who approved it.
Practitioner guidance
- Define evidence-first questionnaire workflows Require every vendor answer to be backed by a specific source document, control statement or policy excerpt before it can be accepted.
- Separate extraction from approval Let automation gather and structure evidence, but keep exception handling, scope decisions and final sign-off with a named control owner.
- Tie vendor review to access lifecycle controls Make onboarding, authentication requirements and offboarding checks part of the same third-party review record so access does not drift beyond approval.
Bottom line: TPRM becomes brittle when evidence is trapped in documents that teams must read, reconcile and retype by hand.
Glossary terms: Third-party risk management, Questionnaire Automation, Evidence Traceability, Vendor offboarding
Explore further
View Full Forum → | NHI Foundation Course → | Our Services → | Read the full analysis →
11/11/2026 5:57 pm
AI-native TPRM is becoming an evidence governance problem, not a questionnaire problem. The useful unit is no longer the form field but the traceable source that supports the answer. Once vendor review depends on structured evidence rather than manual reading, the control conversation shifts from throughput to defensibility.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 92% of organisations expose NHIs to third parties, raising concerns about supply chain security, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
- 55% of healthcare data breaches now originate from a third-party vendor, according to Ponemon Institute’s 2023 Third-Party Risk in Healthcare report.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What is the difference between due diligence and continuous monitoring in TPRM?
A: Due diligence is the initial assessment of a vendor’s controls, ownership, data handling, and inherent risk before onboarding or renewal. Continuous monitoring is the ongoing checking of changes, alerts, attestations, and control evidence after approval, so new risk, expired certificates, scope drift, or control failures are caught between review cycles.
👉 Read our full editorial: AI-native TPRM speeds vendor reviews with traceable evidence