Tag: Outsourcing

  • Vendor Management in 3 Parts. Part 2 – Risk Assessment (or, “will they or won’t they?”)

    In Part 1 I said that vendor management, just as any other risk management endeavor, consists of 3 basic phases; Identify the risk Assess the risk, and Control the risk I also discussed why risk identification was a more difficult task today because of the “access to data” question, and also because “data” includes not just NPI, but confidential […]

  • Vendor Management in 3 Parts. Part 1 – Risk Identification (or, “do they or don’t they?”)

    Service provider oversight (aka vendor management) is undoubtedly the hottest hot-button item on the regulator’s agenda right now, and for good reason.  For one thing, regulators know that the vast majority of financial institutions outsource at some point, in fact recent studies put the number of FI’s that either transmit, process or store information with […]

  • The OCC Sets a New Standard for Vendor Management…

    …but will it become the new standard for institutions with other regulators?  UPDATE – The answer is yes, at least for the Federal Reserve.  Readers of this blog know that I’ve been predicting an increase in vendor management program scrutiny since early 2010.  And although the FFIEC has been very active in this area, issuing […]

  • Ask the Guru: Vendor vs. Service Provider

    Hey GuruI recently had an FDIC examiner tell me that we needed to make a better distinction between a vendor and a service provider.  His point seemed to be that by lumping them together in our vendor management program we were “over-analyzing” them.  He suggested that we should be focused instead only on those few […]

  • Risk Assessing iCloud (and other online backups) – UPDATE 2, DropBox

    Update 2 (8/2012) – Cloud-based storage vendor DropBox confirmed recently that a stolen employee password led to the theft of a “project document” that contained user e-mail addresses. Those addresses were then used to SPAM DropBox users.  The password itself was not stolen directly from the DropBox site, but from another site the employee used.  […]

  • FFIEC issues Cloud Computing Guidance

    Actually the document is classified as “for informational purposes only”, which is to say that it is not a change or update to any specific Handbook and presumably does not carry the weight of regulatory guidance.  However, it is worth a read by all financial institutions outsourcing services because it provides reinforcement for, and references […]