Vendors and suppliers are consistently the point of compromise organizations see last — and the risk category that sits highest on both incidence and expected loss.
Third party risk mitigation is the structured process of tiering vendors by the data and access they hold, assessing their cyber controls, and monitoring them continuously rather than once a year — because vendors and suppliers are consistently the highest-incidence, highest-loss category on the cybersecurity risk landscape.
Every vendor, contractor, and software supplier that touches your data or network extends your attack surface past your own controls. A compromised third party can expose customer data, disrupt operations, or hand an attacker a trusted path directly into your environment — and because the weakness sits outside your walls, it's typically found last, after the impact has already reached you.
AAOOMI's recommended partner for this solution, Tiger Advisory, delivers Third-Party Risk Management and Cyber Risk Assessments as a Service as the core of its practice — anchored by a dedicated team serving multiple clients in parallel across Tier 1, Tier 2, and regional financial institutions. The program spans three areas: end-to-end TPRM (vendor inventory and tiering, contractual risk review, control validation, and continuous oversight, aligned to OCC, FFIEC, FRB SR 13-19, NIST, and ISO 27036); subject-matter-led cyber risk assessments for critical, high, and moderate-risk third parties, delivered per-audit or on an annual retainer with full evidence packs, remediation tracking, and regulator-ready reporting; and adjacent capabilities across regulatory compliance, ongoing risk monitoring, AI governance, and data governance.
Delivery is built around senior practitioners rather than junior staff working from a checklist, with flexible commercial terms and a follow-the-sun model across global delivery centers that compresses assessment cycles by working continuously across time zones.
For one top-tier global financial services client, a previous Big Four provider billed roughly double Tiger Advisory's blended rate while averaging about 120 days per critical vendor assessment — creating onboarding bottlenecks across the program. Tiger Advisory compressed average assessment time to under 60 days per case, a reduction of more than 50%, while sustaining throughput of 400+ assessments annually for that client alongside a comparable cadence across several other top-tier engagements.
Financial services and healthcare organizations carry explicit regulatory obligations for the vendors that process customer and patient data. HCM platforms and transportation networks depend on dense subcontractor and integration ecosystems where a single weak link can cascade across every customer they serve — and where a slow, Big-Four-paced assessment cycle can leave a material vendor unassessed for months.
TPRM is the ongoing process of identifying, tiering, assessing, and monitoring the cybersecurity risk introduced by vendors, suppliers, and other third parties with access to your data or systems.
High-risk, critical vendors typically warrant continuous monitoring plus a full reassessment at least annually; lower-tier vendors can follow a lighter, less frequent cycle scaled to their actual data and access exposure.
Common reference frameworks in financial services include OCC guidance, FFIEC, FRB SR 13-19, NIST, and ISO 27036, alongside sector-specific requirements like HIPAA in healthcare.
Reach our third-party risk partner directly to scope an assessment.